Hardness of Linearly Ordered 4-Colouring of 3-Colourable 3-Uniform Hypergraphs

A linearly ordered (LO) k-colouring of a hypergraph is a colouring of its vertices with colours 1,..., k such that each edge contains a unique maximal colour. Deciding whether an input hypergraph admits LO k-colouring with a fixed number of colours is NP-complete (and in the special case of graphs, LO colouring coincides with the usual graph colouring). Here, we investigate the complexity of approximating the "linearly ordered chromatic number" of a hypergraph. We prove that the following promise problem is NP-complete: Given a 3-uniform hypergraph, distinguish between the case that it is LO 3-colourable, and the case that it is not even LO 4-colourable. We prove this result by a combination of algebraic, topological, and combinatorial methods, building on and extending a topological approach for studying approximate graph colouring introduced by Krokhin, Oprsal, Wrochna, and Zivny (2023).