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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.6 National olympiad Prove it Saudi Arabia

There are 3 clubs A,B,CA, B, C with non-empty members. For any triplet of members (a,b,c)(a, b, c) with aA,bB,cCa \in A, b \in B, c \in C, two of them are friend and two of them are not friend (here the friend relationship is bidirectional). Prove that one of these statements must be true

1. There exist one student from AA that knows all students from BB.
2. There exist one student from BB that knows all students from CC.
3. There exist one student from CC that knows all students from AA.

Solution

We will prove the statement by induction on the maximum number of members in clubs A,B,CA, B, C.

For n=1n=1, each club has exactly one member and the statement is obviously true.

Suppose that when the maximum numbers in three clubs is n1n \geq 1, then one of three above conditions holds. Assume that aAa \in A is friend of all members in BB. Consider a new member xx to make the maximum number of members increased by 1. It is easy to see that if xAx \in A or xCx \in C, then the conditions are still true (since the members in BB remains unchanged).

If xBx \in B, denote B={b1,b2,,bn,bn+1}B=\{b_{1}, b_{2}, \ldots, b_{n}, b_{n+1}\} with bn+1xb_{n+1} \equiv x. In case (a,x)(a, x) are friend, the condition 1) is true and we are done. So we may assume that (a,x)(a, x) are not friend. Partition CC into two subsets, C1C_{1} has members that are friend of aa, and C2C_{2} has members that are not friend of aa. Take c1C1c_{1} \in C_{1} and c2C2c_{2} \in C_{2} (if any).

For 1kn1 \leq k \leq n, consider (a,bk,c1)(a, b_{k}, c_{1}), we have (a,bk)(a, b_{k}) are friend (since before adding xx, member aa is friend of all members of BB) and (a,c1)(a, c_{1}) are friend so (bk,c1)(b_{k}, c_{1}) are not friend (by the given condition).

Consider (a,x,c2)(a, x, c_{2}), we have (x,c2)(x, c_{2}) are friend (since (a,x),(a,c2)(a, x), (a, c_{2}) are not friend).

- If xx is friend of all members in C1C_{1} then xx is friend of all members in C=C1C2C = C_{1} \cup C_{2} and condition 2) is true.
- Otherwise, c1C\exists c_{1} \in C such that c1c_{1} is not friend of xx, also is not friend of all members in BB. If aA\exists a' \in A such that (a,c1)(a', c_{1}) are not friend, then consider (a,bk,c1)(a', b_{k}, c_{1}) with 1kn+11 \leq k \leq n+1 then aa' is friend of all bkb_{k}, condition 1) is true. Otherwise, c1c_{1} are friend of all members in AA and condition 3) is true.

Hence, in all cases, the condition is always true.

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