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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.2 National olympiad Prove it Ukraine

The country has n3n \ge 3 airports, some pairs of which are connected by bidirectional flights. Every day, the government closes the airport from which the largest number of flights is flying. What is the maximum number of days this can continue?

Figure 1
Fig. 17

Solution

We will use the obvious interpretation in the language of graphs, and for convenience, we will move on to graph complements. From now on, every day the vertex of strictly lowest degree will be removed.

It is clear that when 2 vertices remain, nothing else will happen. For n=3n = 3 this bound is achieved by connecting two of the three vertices with an edge.

We show that if at some point there were 4 vertices, there will always be at least 3. Indeed, suppose that there were vertices AA, BB, CC, DD, and first vertex DD was removed, and then CC. Then the vertex DD cannot be connected to any of the vertices AA, BB. Also note that in a graph of three vertices AA, BB, CC the vertex CC also cannot be connected to any of the vertices AA, BB. But then in the graph on these four vertices the degree of DD was at least that of CC, contradiction.

For example, consider the following graph: a chain of vertices A1A_1, A2A_2, A3A_3, ..., AnA_n, where every two adjacent vertices are connected, and in addition An2A_{n-2} is connected to AnA_n (fig. 17). It is clear that the vertices will be removed one by one, in order A1A_1, A2A_2, A3A_3, ..., An3A_{n-3}.

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