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Combinatorics Difficulty 7.5 National olympiad, round 2 Prove it China

There are nn (n3n \ge 3) players in a table tennis tournament, in which any two players have a match. Player AA is called not out-performed by player BB, if at least one of player AA's losers is not a BB's loser.
Determine, with proof, all possible values of nn, such that the following case could happen: after finishing all the matches, every player is not out-performed by any other player.

Solution

The answer is n=3n = 3 or n5n \ge 5.

(1) For n=3n = 3, suppose AA, BB and CC are three players, and the result of three matches are as follows: AA wins BB, BB wins CC, and CC wins AA. These results obviously satisfy the condition.

(2) If n=4n = 4, suppose that the condition holds, i.e., in view of the results of all matches, every player is not out-performed by any other player. It is obvious that none of these four players wins in his three games, otherwise, the other three players will be not out-performed by this player. Similarly, none of these three players loses in his three games. It follows that each player wins one or two matches.
For the player AA, assume that AA wins BB and DD, but loses to CC, then both BB and DD win CC; otherwise, they would not out-performed AA. For the loser in the match BB vs. DD, he only wins CC, and so the loser is impossible to be not out-performed by the winner. Consequently, for n=4n = 4, the given condition could not happen.

(3) For n=6n = 6, one can construct the tournament results by means of the following directed graph, in which each black dot represents a player, and \bullet \to \circ represents a match with the result that player \bullet wins player \circ.

Figure 1

(4) If there exist tournament results such that each of nn players AiA_i (1in1 \le i \le n) is not out-performed by any other player, we will prove that the same holds for n+2n + 2 players as follows: Suppose that MM and NN are the additional players to the original nn players. Construct the game results of MM and NN as follows:
AiM,MN,NAi A_i \to M, M \to N, N \to A_i
for all i=1,2,,ni = 1, 2, \dots, n, and the game results among AiA_i's are still the original ones. Now we want to check that these n+2n+2 players satisfy the given condition. For any player G{A1,A2,,An}G \in \{A_1, A_2, \dots, A_n\}, then it suffices to consider the players G,M,NG, M, N, and it reduces to the case n=3n = 3.

Figure 2

One can check that each of these three players G,M,NG, M, N is not out-performed by any one of the other two players. Hence, the tournament result of these n+2n+2 players satisfies the required condition.

In particular, it follows from (1) and the induction step of (4) that the required condition holds for any odd nn with n3n \ge 3. Moreover, it follows from (3) and the induction step of (4) that the required condition holds for any even nn with n6n \ge 6, and it completes the proof. \square

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