Is there a temporal analogue of the four colour map theorem?
What is the minimum number of colours needed to prevent the same one being
used, not just once in adjacent blocks, but also in consecutive time
points? I understand the answer for 3d is infinite, but I don't know if
it's the same for this question?
The reason I ask has to do with drug resistance in infectious diseases.
Parasites are usually able to evolve resistance faster than we can find
new drugs. But for some diseases we have quite a few drugs that worked
quite well until this happened. Furthermore, resistance to drugs is
sometimes a compromise that the parasite would "prefer" to do without.
That is, if the drug pressure is lifted the population reverts back to the
wild-type. If existing drugs could be divided up into regions, such that
the same drug is never used in adjacent regions in consecutive time
periods, this could maybe slow the spread of resistance.
No comments:
Post a Comment