We prove that coloring a 3-uniform 2-colorable hypergraph with c colors is NP-hard for any constant c. The best known algorithm [20] colors such a graph using O(n 1/5 ) colors. Our result immediately implies that for any constants k ≥ 3 and c2 > c1 > 1, coloring a k-uniform c1-colorable hypergraph with c2 colors is NP-hard; the case k = 2, however, remains wide open. This is the first hardness result for approximately-coloring a 3-uniform hypergraph that is colorable with a constant number of colors. For k ≥ 4 such a result has been shown by [14], who also discussed the inherent difference between the k = 3 case and k ≥ 4.Our proof presents a new connection between the Long-Code and the Kneser graph, and relies on the high chromatic numbers of the Kneser graph [19,22] and the Schrijver graph [26]. We prove a certain maximization variant of the Kneser conjecture, namely that any coloring of the Kneser graph by fewer colors than its chromatic number, has 'many' non-monochromatic edges.

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Classical Ramsey theory (at least in its simplest form) is concerned with problems of the following kind: given a set X and a colouring of the set [X]n of unordered n-tuples from X, find a subset Y ⊆ X such that all elements of [Y]n get the same colour. Subsets with this property are called monochromatic or homogeneous, and a typical positive result in Ramsey theory has the form that when X is large enough and the number of colours is small enough we can expect to find reasonably large monochromatic sets.Polychromatic Ramsey theory is concerned with a “dual” problem, in which we are given a colouring of [X]n and are looking for subsets Y ⊆ X such that any two distinct elements of [Y]n get different colours. Subsets with this property are called polychromatic or rainbow. Naturally if we are looking for rainbow subsets then our task becomes easier when there are many colours. In particular given an integer k we say that a colouring is k-bounded when each colour is used for at most k many n-tuples.At this point it will be convenient to introduce a compact notation for stating results in polychromatic Ramsey theory. We recall that in classical Ramsey theory we write to mean “every colouring of [κ]n in k colours has a monochromatic set of order type α”. We will write to mean “every k-bounded colouring of [κ]n has a polychromatic set of order type α”. We note that when κ is infinite and k is finite a k-bounded colouring will use exactly κ colours, so we may as well assume that κ is the set of colours used.

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