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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.3 National olympiad Prove it Belarus

Given a graph with nn (n4n \ge 4) vertices. It is known that for any two of the vertices there is a vertex connected with none of these two vertices.
Find the greatest possible number of the edges in the graph.
(E. Barabanov)

Solution

(Solution by Y. Dubovik, L. Manzhulina, I. Pchalintsau, B. Serankou.)
First, for the sake of convenience, we reformulate the problem as follows. Any
two of nn vertices of the graph (n4n \ge 4) are connected with an edge either of
red or of blue color. It is known that for any two vertices there exists a vertex
connected to both the vertices with blue edges. Find the maximum number of
red edges (or, equivalently, the minimum number of blue edges) in the graph.
We find the minimum number kk of blue edges then the maximum number of
red edges is n(n1)2k\frac{n(n-1)}{2} - k. In the
figures blue edges are shown, all
the absent edges are red. These
figures show that the minimum
number of blue edges cannot be
greater than k=n1+n2k = n - 1 + \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor.
Show that this number is indeed
the smallest possible. We call the
number of blue edges containing
a vertex a degree of this vertex. If the degrees of all the graph vertices are at least 3, then the total number of blue edges is at least k1=3n2>kk_1 = \frac{3n}{2} > k. So we may assume that there is a vertex AA of degree 2. Let ABAB and ACAC be the corresponding blue edges. Applying the problem condition to AA and BB, we conclude that BB and CC are certainly connected with blue edge. Let MM be the set of remaining (other than AA, BB, CC) vertices. Then any vertex from MM must be connected with blue edge either to BB or to CC. For any vertex from MM we mark this edge. From the problem condition it follows that in addition to marked edges at least one blue edge should outgo from any vertex of MM.
The number of these additional edges is not less than n22=n21\lfloor \frac{n-2}{2} \rfloor = \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor - 1.
Therefore there are at least
3+n3+n21=n1+n23 + n - 3 + \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor - 1 = n - 1 + \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor
blue edges as was claimed.

n is odd
Figure 1
n is even
Figure 2

So, the maximum number of the red edges is
n(n1)2(n1)n2=(n2)(n1)2n2. \frac{n(n-1)}{2} - (n-1) - \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor = \frac{(n-2)(n-1)}{2} - \lfloor \frac{n}{2} \rfloor .

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