A Tight Lower Bound for 3-Coloring Grids in the Online-LOCAL Model

Recently, Akbari, Eslami, Lievonen, Melnyk, S\"{a}rkij\"{a}rvi, and Suomela (ICALP 2023) studied the locality of graph problems in distributed, sequential, dynamic, and online settings from a unified point of view. They designed a novel $O(\log n)$-locality algorithm for proper 3-coloring bipartite graphs in the $\mathsf{Online}$-$\mathsf{LOCAL}$ model. In this work, we show the optimality of the algorithm by demonstrating a tight $\Omega(\log n)$ locality lower bound which holds even on grids. Moreover, we show a higher $\Omega(\sqrt{n})$ lower bound for 3-coloring toroidal and cylindrical grids.