The cochromatic number of $G$, denoted by $\zeta(G)$, is the minimum number of colours needed to colour the vertices of $G$ such that each colour class induces either a complete graph or empty graph.

A conjecture of Erdős, Gimbel, and Straight [EGS90], who proved that for every $n>2$ there exists some $f(n)$ such that if $G$ contains no clique on $n$ vertices then $\chi(G)\leq \zeta(G)+f(n)$.