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Combinatorics Difficulty 7.5 National olympiad, round 2 Prove it Argentina

The river city of Platense consists of several platforms and bridges between them. Each bridge connects two platforms and no two bridges are connecting the same two platforms. The mayor wants to change some bridges through a series of moves as follows: if there are three platforms AA, BB and CC, and bridges ABAB and ACAC but not BCBC, then ABAB can be changed to BCBC.
Figure 1
A bridge configuration is good if you can go from any platform to any other using only the bridges. Starting from a good configuration, show that the mayor can reach any other good configuration, whose number of bridges is the same, through the movements described.

Solution

Let us interpret the problem in terms of graphs. We can think of the initial configuration as a graph GG whose vertices are the platforms and whose edges are the bridges. This graph is connected. The claim is, then, that GG can be converted into another graph GG' by rotating edges as in the statement if GG' is connected and has the same number of vertices and edges as GG. To prove this we will build a normal form of the graph in several steps. Note that, as the operations are invertible, the claim will be proved if this normal form depends only on the number of edges and vertices. We label the vertices of GG as v1,,vnv_1, \dots, v_n, and suppose GG has mm edges.

STEP 1: Make v1v_1 have degree n1n-1.
Assume that v1v_1 is not a neighbor of viv_i. Since the graph is connected, there is a path connecting v1v_1 to viv_i, i.e, there exists a sequence of vertices w0,w1,,wkw_0, w_1, \dots, w_k such that w0=v1w_0 = v_1, wk=viw_k = v_i, and wj,wj+1w_j, w_{j+1} are connected by an edge for all 0jk10 \le j \le k-1. Let's take one such path with kk minimal. By our initial assumption we have k2k \ge 2. Moreover, by minimality, v1v_1 is not connected to wjw_j for any j>1j > 1. Therefore, we can apply the operation to A=w1,B=w2A = w_1, B = w_2 and C=v1C = v_1. In this way, we get a shorter path connecting v1v_1 to viv_i without disconnecting v1v_1. By iterating this procedure we reach a situation in which viv_i is a neighbor of v1v_1, without removing any edges from v1v_1. So in the end v1v_1 will be connected by an edge to all viv_i, and thus its degree will be n1n-1.

Figure 2
We will refer to this sequence of moves as ()(\star).

Let G1G_1 be the graph obtained after Step 1, and H1H_1 be the graph obtained by removing vertex v1v_1 (with all its incident edges) from G1G_1. Let CC be the connected component of v2v_2 in H1H_1. Finally, let m=m(n1)m' = m - (n-1) be the number of edges of HH, and N:=min{m+1,n1}N := \min\{m' + 1, n-1\}.

STEP 2: Make the size of CC equal to NN.
If HH is connected, then C=HC = H which has size n1n-1. We also have mn2m' \ge n-2, so N=n1N = n-1, and there is nothing to do.
If there is an edge between two vertices viv_i and vjv_j that are not in the same connected component as v2v_2, we can use ()(\star) to rotate edge vivjv_iv_j into viv2v_iv_2, so now viv_i is in CC as well. We iterate this until it is no longer possible. This is because either HH is now connected (and we are done), or because all other connected components have size 1 (isolated vertices). In the latter case, observe that now all the mm' edges are in CC, which is connected, so CC has at most m+1m' + 1 vertices. If there are exactly m+1m' + 1 vertices, we are done. Otherwise, since the number of edges is greater than or equal to the number of vertices, there is at least one edge vivjv_i v_j that can be removed without disconnecting CC. So, if there is an isolated vertex vkv_k, using ()(\star) we can rotate vivjv_i v_j into vivkv_i v_k, which adds vkv_k to CC. We can keep doing this until either C=HC = H or we run out of edges, i.e., the size of CC is m+1m' + 1.

STEP 3: Make v2v_2 connected to v3,,vN+1v_3, \dots, v_{N+1}.
First we proceed as in Step 1 to make sure that v2v_2 is connected to all vertices in CC. If C={v2,v3,,vN+1}C = \{v_2, v_3, \dots, v_{N+1}\}, we are done. Otherwise, there exist 3iN+13 \le i \le N+1 and j>N+1j > N+1 such that v2vjv_2 v_j is an edge but v2viv_2 v_i is not. So we can rotate v2vjv_2 v_j into v2viv_2 v_i, and iterate the process.
After Step 3, we consider the subgraph G2G_2 whose vertices are v2,v3,,vN+1v_2, v_3, \dots, v_{N+1}. This graph is connected and, moreover, v2v_2 is connected to all other vertices, so we are in the same situation we were with G1G_1, and we can iterate Step 2 and Step 3. This goes on until we run out of edges, and we reach the normal form. Since deg(vi)\deg(v_i) depends exclusively on nn and mm for all ii, the problem is solved.

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