I found a nice introduction on how to Use Gröbner bases to construct the colorings of a finite graph.
Now my graphs $G=(V,E)$ are the line graphs planar of cubic graphs, so they are $3$-regular. The corresponding edge-adjacency matrices can be constructed, as shown here (in a crude way, I admit...). The existence of $3$-colorings on the edges of $G$ is quaranteed by planarity (On surfaces with higher genus only bipartite cubic graphs have chromatic index of $3$.)
Now let there be a field $F = \mathbb{Z}/3\mathbb{Z}$. Let's define two types of polynomials on $F$:
- $f(x) = x(x-1)(x-2)= x^3-x=0$, which asks for one of three colors at edge $x_c$ and
- $g(x,y) = y^2+yx+x^2-1=0$, which asks for colors being different for the adjacent edges $y$ and $x$.
Let $I$ be the ideal $I = (x_c^3-x_c \ |\ x_c \in E) + (x_r^2+x_rx_s+x_s^2-1 \ |\ x_{r,s} \in E)$. Note ${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {a}}+{\mathfrak {b}}}$ is the smallest left/right ideal containing both ${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {a}}}$ and ${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {b}}}$ (or the union ${\displaystyle {\mathfrak {a}}\cup {\mathfrak {b}}}$.
Moreover, every solution to this system yields a coloring and can be calculated by using the reduced Gröbner bases for the ideal $I \subseteq F[x_1, \ldots, x_{|E|}]$
Is it possible to calculate the number of solutions of the system of equations using Gröbner bases and if so how to do that?