How many colors to color a random graph? Cavity, Complexity, Stability and all that

Florent Krzakala

Published 2004-09-17, updated 2004-11-01Version 2

We review recent progress on the statiscal physics study of the problem of coloring random graphs with q colors. We discuss the existence of a threeshold at connectivity c_q=2q log q-log q-1+o(1) separting two phases which are respectivily COL(orable) and UNCOL(orable) with q colors; We also argue that the so-called one-step replica symmetry breaking ansatz used to derive these results give it exact threshold values, and draw a general phase diagram of the problem.