Extremal and monotone behaviour of the Sudoku number and related critical set parameters

Abstract: The Sudoku number has been defined under various names, indicating it is a natural concept. There are four variants of this parameter, that can be related to the maximum and minimum size of a critical set in a graph colouring problem. For each of these four related parameters, we present some simple characterizations of the graphs attaining the maximum possible values. As a main result, we answer a question by Cooper and Kirkpatrick, showing that there is monotone behaviour in the number of colours for only two of the four parameters. We investigate the monotone behaviour for the subgraph-order as well. For Latin squares and the Sudoku, we solve some variants for hypergraph colouring.