Tight Inapproximability of Max Independent Set in Triangle-Free Graphs
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This submission formalizes the main inapproximability theorem of Tight Inapproximability of Max Independent Set in Triangle-Free Graphs. Assuming Håstad's promise hardness of Max Independent Set, it proves that, for every constant , a polynomial-time -approximation algorithm on -vertex triangle-free graphs implies .
The reduction blows each vertex of an -vertex graph up into vertices, samples the blow-up edges independently, and resamples the edges of present triangles. The formalization proves triangle-freeness, completeness, the fixed-set soundness estimate, the finite-seed probability bound, and the final gap arithmetic. The infinite product table occurs only in the probabilistic analysis; the program itself reads a polynomially bounded finite family of uniform bits.
Polynomial time, , and use a bounded interpreter for fixed finite binary multi-stack Turing machines. Every semantic answer is the output of that interpreter. The composed triangle-removal program has a fixed recursive evaluator whose state and operation count are produced by the same execution, and the proof derives explicit polynomial bounds for the reduction, the approximation-machine call, decoding, threshold arithmetic, and random bits.
Concepts
- def
Lax47.Complexity - def
Lax47.Gap - def
Lax47.Hastad - def
Lax47.Machine - thm✓
Lax47.Theorem12
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Proofs
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no assumptions
thm✓Lax47.Theorem12
Lean sources for these proofs: proofs/ on GitHub
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@misc{lax-47,
author = {Édouard Bonnet},
title = {Tight Inapproximability of Max Independent Set in Triangle-Free Graphs},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {Lax Archive, lax-47},
url = {https://laxarchive.org/lax-47/},
note = {draft},
}
References
- Édouard Bonnet. Tight Inapproximability of Max Independent Set in Triangle-Free Graphs. 2026.
- Johan Håstad. Clique is hard to approximate within . In 37th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science 627–636, 1996. doi:10.1109/SFCS.1996.548522
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