In the mathematical area of graph theory, a clique in an undirected graph is a subset of its vertices such that every two vertices in the subset are connected by an edge.
Definition
A clique in an undirected graph G = (V, E) is a subset of the vertex set C ⊆ V, such that for every two vertices in C, there exists an edge connecting the two. This is equivalent to saying that the subgraph induced by C is complete (in some cases, the term clique may also refer to the subgraph).
A maximal clique is a clique that cannot be extended by including one more adjacent vertex, that is, a clique which does not exist exclusively within the vertex set of a larger clique.
A maximum clique is a clique of the largest possible size in a given graph. The clique number ω(G) of a graph G is the number of vertices in a maximum clique in G. The intersection number of G is the smallest number of cliques that together cover all edges of G.
The opposite of a clique is an independent set, in the sense that every clique corresponds to an independent set in the complement graph. The clique cover problem concerns finding as few cliques as possible that include every vertex in the graph. A related concept is a biclique, a complete bipartite subgraph. The bipartite dimension of a graph is the minimum number of bicliques needed to cover all the edges of the graph.
Clique Problem
In computer science, the clique problem is the computational problem of finding a maximum clique, or all cliques, in a given graph. It is NP-complete, one of Karp's 21 NP-complete problems (Karp 1972). It is also fixed-parameter intractable, and hard to approximate. Nevertheless, many algorithms for computing cliques have been developed, either running in exponential time (such as the Bron–Kerbosch algorithm) or specialized to graph families such as planar graphs or perfect graphs for which the problem can be solved in polynomial time.
