On the on-line coloring of proper interval graphs

We consider the on-line coloring problem restricted to proper interval graphs with known interval representation. Chrobak and \'{S}lusarek (1981) showed that the greedy $\textrm{First-Fit}$ algorithm has a strict competitive ratio of $2$. It remains open whether there is an on-line algorithm that performs better than $\textrm{First-Fit}$. Piotr (2008) showed that if the representation is not known, there is no better on-line algorithm. Epstein and Levy (2005) showed that no on-line algorithm has a strict competitive ratio less than $1.5$ when a unit-interval representation is known, which was later improved to $1.\overline{3}$. In this paper, we show that there is no on-line algorithm with strict competitive ratio less than $1.75$ by presenting a strategy that can force any on-line algorithm to use $7$ colors on a proper interval graph $G$ with chromatic number $\chi(G)\leq 4$ and known interval representation.