Every monotone 3-graph property is testable

Recently Alon and Shapira [Every monotone graph property is testable, New York, Proceedings of the 37th Annual ACM Symposium on Theory of Computing, Baltimore, MD, ACM Press, 2005, pp. 128-137] have established that every monotone graph property is testable. They raised the question whether their results can be extended to hypergraphs. The aim of this paper is to address this problem. Based on the recent regularity lemma of Rodl and Schacht [ Regular partitions of hypergraphs, Combin. Probab. Comput., to appear], we prove that any monotone property of 3-uniform hypergraphs is testable answering in part the question of Alon and Shapira. Our approach is similar to the one developed by Alon and Shapira for graphs. We believe that based on the general version of the hypergraph regularity lemma the proof presented in this article extends to k-uniform hypergraphs.