On the length of longest alternating paths for multicoloured point sets in convex position

Let P be a set of points in R2 in general position such that each point is coloured with one of k colours. An alternating path of P is a simple polygonal whose edges are straight line segments joining pairs of elements of P with different colours. In this paper we prove the following: suppose that each colour class has cardinality s and P is the set of vertices of a convex polygon. Then P always has an alternating path with at least (k-1)s elements. Our bound is asymptotically sharp for odd values of k.