Abstract: | The notion of a split coloring of a complete graph was introduced by Erd?s and Gyárfás 7 ] as a generalization of split graphs. In this work, we offer an alternate interpretation by comparing such a coloring to the classical Ramsey coloring problem via a two‐round game played against an adversary. We show that the techniques used and bounds obtained on the extremal (r,m)‐split coloring problem of 7 ] are closer in nature to the Turán theory of graphs rather than Ramsey theory. We extend the notion of these colorings to hypergraphs and provide bounds and some exact results. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. J Graph Theory 40: 226–237, 2002 |