Testing hypergraph colorability

We study the problem of testing properties of hypergraphs. The goal of property testing is to distinguish between the case whether a given object has a certain property or is "far away" from the property. We prove that the fundamental problem of l-colorability of k-uniform hypergraphs, can be tested in time independent of the size of the hypergraph. We present a testing algorithm that examines only (k l/epsilon)(O(k)) entries of the adjacency matrix of the input hypergraph, where epsilon is a distance parameter independent of the size of the hypergraph. The algorithm tests only a constant number of entries in the adjacency matrix provided that l, k, and c are constants. This result is a generalization of previous results about testing graph colorability. (C) 2004 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.