Suppose there are airports. Each airport has a number of direct flights to some of the other airports and the following conditions (1), (2) are known to be satisfied:
(1) For any pair of airports, say and , one can go from to , by making connections of several direct flights.
(2) If any one of the direct flights currently in operation is canceled, then the condition (1) will no longer be valid.
One day one of the direct flights in operation is canceled. How many possible ways are there for opening a new direct flight (which may be the same as the canceled one) in order to ensure that both of the conditions (1) and (2) above will be satisfied?
Note that even when there is a direct flight from airport to airport it is not necessarily true that there is a direct flight from to .
Solution
Let us say that the airport is accessible from the airport if one can reach starting from by making connections of direct flights.
First, we will show that the answer we seek is no more than .
In the sequel until we say otherwise, we will assume that we are in the situation where one of the direct flights was canceled from the original set-up in which the operation of direct flights satisfied both of the conditions (1) and (2) of the problem. Then, we see that there is a positive integer such that we can divide the set of the airports into subsets in such a way that the following conditions (a), (b), (c) are satisfied.
(a) None of the subsets () is empty, and every airport belongs to one and only one of the 's.
(b) For each (), for any pair of different airports and belonging to , is accessible from .
(c) For any pair of different (), there are different airports and belonging to or such that is not accessible from .
For different groups and of airports, we say that is accessible from if the following condition is satisfied:
There exist airports and such that belongs to , belongs to and is accessible from .
We also say that a group of airports is a startable group if there exists a group of airports such that is accessible from . If there is no such group , then is called a non-startable group. is called an accessible group if there exists a group such that is accessible from . If there is no such group , then is called a non-accessible group.
Let us first show that there must exist a non-startable group and a non-accessible group. So, suppose on the contrary every group of airports is startable. Then, there exists a sequence of airports such that for every , is accessible from . Since the number of groups is finite, there exist integers for which . Since and are different groups, we must have . But since each group of airports satisfies the condition (b), every airport in the group is accessible from every airport in the group , and every airport in the group is accessible from every airport in the group . But this contradicts the condition (c). Thus we have shown that there must exist a non-startable group. Similarly, we can show that there must exist a non-accessible group.
Now, let be one of the non-startable groups, and be one of the non-accessible groups. Suppose that the direct flight canceled was from airport to airport . Since the condition (1) of the problem was satisfied before the flight was canceled, must belong to the group and to the group . If , then by the condition (b) it would be possible to reach from without using the direct flight, and this would contradict the fact that the condition (2) of the problem was satisfied before the cancelation. Therefore, we must have . We also see that was accessible from before the cancelation, and there was a way to reach from without using the direct flight from to before the cancelation and hence is accessible from even after the cancelation. So, let us suppose that is the route of connecting direct flights starting from and reaching . Now, choose airports and in such a way that the following 2 conditions (i) and (ii) are satisfied:
(i) belongs to the group and belongs to the group .
(ii) There exists a way to reach from using neither a direct flight between 2 airports belonging to nor a direct flight between 2 airports belonging to .
For example, among the 's belonging to , let be the one corresponding to the largest index and define , and define to be the corresponding to the smallest index among () belonging to .
Let us now show by opening a direct flight we can attain a situation where both the conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied. Let us denote by and the airports belonging to the group and , respectively. In order to satisfy the condition (1), we see that we have to open a direct flight starting from an airport in the group and arriving at an airport belonging to the group . Therefore, the number of ways to open a direct flight to achieve our goal is at most . Furthermore, we have the condition . Thus, we see that if
or is satisfied, the number of ways is less than or equal to . We assume in the sequel that both and are greater than or equal to .
Since satisfies the condition (b), there exists an airport in such that there exists a direct flight from to . Similarly, there exists an airport in such that there exists a direct flight from to . Suppose opening a direct flight from to we can get the situation where both of the conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied. We can show that . Suppose on the contrary we have . Then after opening the direct flight , we get a direct flight from to , and by the condition (b) we can reach from by using several direct flights between 2 airports belonging to , and by the condition (ii) we can reach from without using any direct flight between 2 airports belonging to . Thus we can reach from to without using the direct flight from to . If we then cancel the direct flight from to the condition (1) remains valid, so we get a contradiction to the fact that the condition (2) must be satisfied after the direct flight is opened. Therefore, we must have . By a similar argument we can also show that .
We thus see that the number of ways of opening a direct flight so as to have the conditions (1) and (2) satisfied is at most . Since is also satisfied, we see that the desired number is at most .
Let us finally show that there is an example where there are ways of opening a direct flight to have the conditions (1) and (2) satisfied.
Suppose for airports there are direct flights from to , from to for each (), direct flights from to and to , and direct flights from to and from to . We can easily check that the conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied with this situation. Now suppose we cancel the direct flight from to . Then by opening any direct flight from to where and we can get the situation where the conditions (1) and (2) will be satisfied. Thus there are at least ways of opening a direct flight to have both of the conditions (1) and (2) are satisfied.
We have thus shown that the desired answer to the problem is .