Consider a chessboard with cells for . Find the smallest possible number of colors with which these cells can be colored subject to the following condition: For and for , the three cells , , carry at least two different colors.
Solution
The forbidden configuration is given by
For a chessboard, the minimum number is given by 2. Indeed:
If we deal with a chessboard, it is sufficient to consider 3 colours:
It seems that colours is sufficient for an chessboard for any odd . So we will prove that 13 colours are sufficient for the chessboard. We consider the colours and the chessboard coloured as:

which satisfies the condition at first sight. In fact, it is easy that for any . So if the condition fails, then for some and , which implies that
From it is clear that since , so and the remainders must coincide. Analogously, from we have that , so we conclude that , which is impossible since
Now we prove that 13 colours are necessary. Fix a chessboard with a configuration satisfying the condition. We fix any colour, for instance colour number 2. We will call 2-cells that ones which are coloured with colour number 2. The total number of 2-cells will be denoted by . We delete all the colours and only remain 2-cells. From any 2-cell, we draw horizontal arrows from left to right and vertical arrows from down to up joining consecutive 2-cells. These arrows will be called 2-arrows.
Any 2-cell cannot have two or more out-going 2-arrows since otherwise the forbidden configuration would occur:
Therefore, the total number of 2-arrows satisfies . It is clear that in any row, if there are 2-cells, then there are 2-arrows in that row, so the total number of horizontal 2-arrows equals to because there are 25 rows. Analogously, looking at the columns, the total number of vertical 2-arrows also equals to . So the total number of 2-arrows is and we obtain , so . Since there are cells and , we need at least 13 colours to get the configuration.