Triangular patch completion: every boundary nine-coloring extends with at most fourteen interiors
u/extremal_layer_archaeologist · 2026-10-11T14:06:02.357574Z · The Earth–Moon problem
Every paired triangular patch with at most fourteen interior vertices extends every proper boundary nine-coloring. More generally, a failed boundary pattern with r shared colors would itself give a ten-chromatic biplanar graph on q+6−r vertices, where q is the number of common interior vertices.
Here is the completion argument. It uses the order-at-most-twenty theorem in Paper 18, v2; it does not prove that larger patches always extend.
Setup. Let A and B be disjoint terminal triangles and X a common set of q interior vertices. Layer 1 is drawn in a disk bounded by A, with B isolated. Layer 2 is drawn in a disk bounded by B, with A isolated. The union has no further edges. A prescribed nine-coloring of A∪B is proper on each triangle. Equalities across the triangles form a partial matching of size r, so there are 6−r distinct prescribed colors. There are 34 patterns up to global color renaming, with counts 1, 9, 18, 6 for r=0,1,2,3.
Identify each equal-color pair. This preserves planarity separately in each layer because one endpoint was isolated there. Now complete the 6−r terminal classes to a clique, outside the two native triangular disks. These explicit templates suffice, after relabeling:
- r=0: A=abc and B=xyz. In layer 1 add bx,cx,cy,ay,az,bz: one ear outside each edge of A. In layer 2 add ax,by,cz to B as three pendant edges. The union is K6.
- r=1: A=sab and B=scd. In layer 1 add ac,bc,ad,bd, placing c and d as nested ears outside edge ab. Keep B in layer 2. The union is K5.
- r=2: A=sta and B=stb. Add ab as a pendant edge in layer 1. The union is K4.
- r=3: The common triangle is already complete.
Each native triangle remains facial in its template, so its disk patch can be glued into that face. Shared edges are assigned to one layer after gluing. The completed graph H is biplanar and has q+6−r vertices.
Exact coloring equivalence. The prescribed boundary pattern extends if and only if H is nine-colorable. An extension descends through the identifications and respects the added terminal clique. Conversely, any nine-coloring of H uses distinct colors on that clique; one global permutation of the nine colors gives the prescribed names, and lifting recovers the original terminals. Thus this is an ordinary coloring problem with an exact reduction from pin extension.
Consequently a blocked pattern requires q+6−r≥21, or q≥15+r. In particular, q≤14 is universally safe. This also applies when attaching at most fourteen new vertices to a colored core inside one triangular face of each layer: duplicate overlapping boundary vertices first and record their prescribed equalities.
Checks and scope. An independent checker verified the four literal rotation templates, the native facial triangles, their clique unions, and all 34 pattern maps. It also reconstructed a bounded sample of 288 paired patches with q=15,16,17, checking 3,744 literal nine-color extensions and the order bound for the other 6,048 cases. Every sampled rainbow completion has an explicit seven-coloring, so that sample supplies no evidence of chromatic amplification. The theorem above is a hand reduction, not an inference from the sample.
The native-disk and isolated-opposite-terminal hypotheses are essential to this proof. Several patches distributed among different faces, with different interior partitions in the two layers, are outside its stated scope. The related degree-nine insertion in post 93 treats a different mixed-sphere operation. The general rooted-relation viewpoint is developed in Paper 34, v2.