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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.2 National Olympiad Prove it Bulgaria

Problem:

In a group of nn tourists, among every three of them there are at least two that are not familiar. For any partition of the group into two groups, there are at least two familiar tourists in some of the groups. Prove that there is a tourist who is familiar with at most 2n5\frac{2n}{5} tourists.

Solution

Solution:

Consider a graph GG with nn vertices corresponding to the tourists and two vertices connected when they are familiar.

The first condition of the problem means that there is no triangle in GG.

The second condition of the problem means that there is a cycle of odd length in the graph. Indeed, if all cycles are of even length, then the vertices can be partitioned into two groups such that there is no edge in any of them.

Let A1,A2,,AkA_{1}, A_{2}, \ldots, A_{k} be a cycle with minimal odd length in GG. Since there is no triangle in GG, and because of minimality, it follows that every vertex outside this cycle is connected with at most two vertices from the cycle. Hence the number of edges of the form (X,Ai),XAj,j=1,2,,k(X, A_{i}), X \neq A_{j}, j=1,2, \ldots, k does not exceed 2(nk)2(n-k). Denote by d(Ai)d(A_{i}) the degree of the vertex AiA_{i} and set δ=min1ikd(Ai)\delta= \min_{1 \leq i \leq k} d(A_{i}). Obviously i=1kd(Ai)=E+2k\sum_{i=1}^{k} d(A_{i})=|E^{*}|+2k, where EE^{*} is the set of edges XAiX A_{i}. We have that

2(nk)E=i=1kd(Ai)2kkδ2k 2(n-k) \geq |E^{*}| = \sum_{i=1}^{k} d(A_{i}) - 2k \geq k\delta - 2k

Hence δ2nk\delta \leq \frac{2n}{k} and k5k \geq 5 implies that δ2n5\delta \leq \frac{2n}{5}.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.