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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.9 National olympiad Prove it Belarus

There are n2n \ge 2 cities in a country. Some pairs of cities are connected with an air communication, and for any such pair the connection is mutual. It is possible to travel from one city to another (possibly with a couple of flights). It is also known that the minimal number of flights that are needed to travel from any given city to another doesn't exceed the same number mm, and for any city AA there exists another city BB which cannot be reached from AA by less than mm flights.
Given nn, find all possible values of mm, for which it is possible.
(Aliaksei Vaidzelevich)

Solution

Answer: 1,2,,[n/2]1, 2, \ldots, [n/2].

We reformulate the problem in the language of Graph Theory. Consider a graph, the vertices of which correspond to cities and the edges correspond to air connections. It is given that the graph is connected and the eccentricity of all of its vertices (the greatest of the minimal distances from it to other vertices) equals its radius (number mm). We will show that the radius of a graph on nn vertices can't be greater than [n/2][n/2], which will imply that m[n/2]m \le [n/2].

Start the process of deleting edges in the graph one by one, preserving the connectivity of it, as long as possible. We will end with a tree. For a tree on nn vertices, the maximal length of a chain doesn't exceed n1n-1 edge, hence, it is possible to reach any vertex from a central one (or from two central ones) by [n/2][n/2] steps, which implies that the radius of the tree doesn't exceed [n/2][n/2]. It is left to note that the radius doesn't decrease when deleting edges, so our claim is proved.

Consider now any number m[n/2]m \le [n/2]. Take a cycle of length 2m2m, whose radius clearly equals mm. Choose a vertex vv of a cycle and create n2mn-2m copies of it, each of which is connected only to both neighbours of vv. Then draw an edge between any pairs of copies of vv, and connect vv with all of them. Clearly, the constructed graph satisfies the problem's conditions.

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