Problem

Source: India TST 2023 Day 1 P1

Tags: combinatorics, graph theory



In the fictional country of Mahishmati, there are $50$ cities, including a capital city. Some pairs of cities are connected by two-way flights. Given a city $A$, an ordered list of cities $C_1,\ldots, C_{50}$ is called an antitour from $A$ if every city (including $A$) appears in the list exactly once, and for each $k\in \{1,2,\ldots, 50\}$, it is impossible to go from $A$ to $C_k$ by a sequence of exactly $k$ (not necessarily distinct) flights. Baahubali notices that there is an antitour from $A$ for any city $A$. Further, he can take a sequence of flights, starting from the capital and passing through each city exactly once. Find the least possible total number of antitours from the capital city. Proposed by Sutanay Bhattacharya