The VC-dimension of strongly regular graphs

Abstract: A graph $G$ is $n$-existentially closed or $n$-e.c. if, for all subsets $S\subseteq V(G)$ with $|S|=n$ and for all partitions $S=A\sqcup B$, there exists a vertex in $V(G)\sm S$ adjacent to all vertices in $A$ and no vertices in $B$. We study the minimum number of edges $m(v,n)$ of a $v$-vertex $n$-e.c. graph, and show that $m(v,2)=3v+O(1)$ while $m(v,n)=Θ(v\log v)$ for fixed $n\ge 3$. The latter result uses a connection to binary covering arrays. A related parameter is the VC-dimension of $G$, defined as the size of the largest subset of vertices shattered by the neighborhoods of vertices in $G$. We initiate systematic study of the VC-dimensions of strongly regular graphs (SRGs). We characterize the sufficiently large SRGs with VC-dimension 2. Furthermore, we determine the VC-dimension of sufficiently large Latin square graphs and of all SRGs of order at most 28, and we show that the SRGs with a given integer as smallest eigenvalue have bounded VC-dimension.