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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.0 National Olympiad Prove it Croatia

Each side and each diagonal of a convex nn-gon is colored in one of kk colors. It is known that there doesn't exist a closed monochrome broken line whose vertices are also the vertices of the given nn-gon. Determine the largest possible value of nn. (Russia 1990)

Solution

It is known that a graph with nn vertices that contains no cycles has at most n1n-1 edges. That fact is easily proven by induction by the number of vertices nn. Hence, at most n1n-1 edges (i.e. sides and diagonals) can be colored with the same color.

Since the number of colors is kk and the total number of edges (sides and diagonals) is n(n1)2\frac{n(n-1)}{2}, we conclude that
n(n1)2(n1)k, i.e. n2k. \frac{n(n-1)}{2} \le (n-1)k, \quad \text{ i.e. } n \le 2k.
Let kk be an arbitrary positive integer. We will show that we can color the sides and diagonals of a regular 2k2k-gon with kk colors so that there doesn't exist a closed monochrome broken line (without loss of generality we can assume that the polygon is regular because we only care how the edges are colored). Moreover, we will show that with each of the kk colors we can color exactly 2k12k-1 sides and diagonals in the required way.

Let us denote the vertices of the regular 2k2k-gon with A1,A2,,A2kA_1, A_2, \dots, A_{2k}. With one color we color the broken line A1A2kA2A2k1AiA2k+1iAkAk+1A_1A_{2k}A_2A_{2k-1}\dots A_iA_{2k+1-i}\dots A_kA_{k+1}, 2ik2 \le i \le k, as shown on the picture below.
Figure 1

The broken lines obtained in such a way are disjoint because otherwise one of the diagonals would be left unpainted, and that is not possible.

Therefore, the largest possible value of nn is 2k2k.

With each following color jj, j{2,,k}j \in \{2, \dots, k\} we color the broken line obtained by rotating the mentioned one by angle jπk\frac{j\pi}{k} around the center of the polygon.

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