An odd chordless cycle is a chordless cycle of length .
A graph is said to be perfect iff neither the graph
nor its graph complement
has an odd chordless cycle. A graph with no 5-cycle and
no larger odd chordless cycle is therefore automatically perfect.
This is true since the presence of a chordless 5-cycle in
corresponds to a 5-cycle in
and
can have no chordless 7-cycle or larger since the diagonals
of these cycles in
would contain a 5-cycle in
.