MHB Can one choose a winning team from each day in a round-robin tournament with no repeats?

  • Thread starter Thread starter Ackbach
  • Start date Start date
Click For Summary
In a round-robin tournament with $2n$ teams over $2n-1$ days, each team plays every other team exactly once, resulting in one winner per game. It is possible to select one winning team from each day without repeating any team, as demonstrated by a bipartite graph approach. For any subset of days, there are at least as many distinct winning teams as days, ensuring a valid selection. This conclusion is supported by Hall's Marriage Theorem, which confirms that matches can be made between days and winning teams. Thus, the answer to the problem is affirmative.
Ackbach
Gold Member
MHB
Messages
4,148
Reaction score
94
Here is this week's POTW:

-----

A round-robin tournament of $2n$ teams lasted for $2n-1$ days, as follows. On each day, every team played one game against another team, with one team winning and one team losing in each of the $n$ games. Over the course of the tournament, each team played every other team exactly once. Can one necessarily choose one winning team from each day without choosing any team more than once?

-----

Remember to read the https://mathhelpboards.com/showthread.php?772-Problem-of-the-Week-%28POTW%29-Procedure-and-Guidelines to find out how to https://mathhelpboards.com/forms.php?do=form&fid=2!
 
Physics news on Phys.org
No one solved this week's POTW, which was Problem B-3 in the 2012 Putnam Archives. The solution, attributed to Kiran Kedlaya and associates, follows.

[sp]The answer is yes. We first note that for any collection of $m$
days with $1\leq m\leq 2n-1$, there are at least $m$ distinct teams that
won a game on at least one of those days. If not, then any of the teams
that lost games on all of those days must in particular have lost to $m$
other teams, a contradiction.

If we now construct a bipartite graph whose vertices are the $2n$ teams
and the $2n-1$ days, with an edge linking a day to a team if that team
won their game on that day, then any collection of $m$ days is connected
to a total of at least $m$ teams. It follows from Hall's Marriage Theorem
that one can match the $2n-1$ days with $2n-1$ distinct teams that won on
their respective days, as desired.[/sp]