In a country consisting of $2015$ cities, between any two cities there is exactly one direct round flight operated by some air company. Find the minimal possible number of air companies if direct flights between any three cities are operated by three different air companies.
Problem
Source: Turkey JBMO TST 2015 P3
Tags: combinatorics, graph theory, Turkey, flights
03.06.2017 15:58
I claim that the answer is $2015$: If we represent the problem using graph theory, we need the minimal possible number of colors to color the edges of the complete graph $K_{2015}$ such that every triangle (or $3$-cycle) has edges of different colors. First let us prove that we need at least $2014$ colors. Indeed, take an arbitary vertex. It has degree $2014$. If we would have less than $2014$ colors, then by pigeonhole principle two edges coming from that vertex would have the same color, so we would have a triangle with two same colored edges. We can also see that $2014$ colors are not enough. Indeed, the graph has $\binom{2015}{2}$ edges. If $2014$ colors were enough, then by pigeonhole principle we would have at least $\left[ \frac{2015 \cdot 2014}{2 \cdot 2014} \right ] + 1 = 1008$ edges of a certain color. But $2\cdot1008 = 2016 > 2015$ so at least two of them would share a vertex, which would give a triangle with at least two same colored edges. Now let's prove that $2015$ colors is enough. Numerate the vertices with $1,2,...2015$ in some order. Color the edge that connects the vertices $i$ and $j$ with color $i + j \; mod \; 2015$. If a triangle would have two same colored edges, then they must share a vertex $a$. Let the other two vertices of the triangle be $b$ and $c$. But then we would have $a+b \equiv a+c \; mod \; 2015 \leftrightarrow b \equiv c \; mod \; 2015$ which is impossible because $b \neq c$ and $2015 \nmid b-c$. We conclude that the construction indeed works.