In a tournament, each of $15$ teams played with each other exactly once. Let us call the game “odd” if the total number of games previously played by both competing teams was odd. (a) Prove that there was at least one “odd” game. (b) Could it happen that there was exactly one “odd” game?
Problem
Source: Tournament of Towns Spring 2003 - Junior A-Level - Problem 3
Tags: combinatorics unsolved, combinatorics
math_explorer
15.06.2011 10:43
Consider the number of teams $n$ who have previously played an odd number of games.
$n$ must always be even, since each game adds 1 to the previous-game-count of two teams (aka handshake theorem).
Each odd game doesn't affect $n$; each non-odd game increases or decreases $n$ by $2$. Furthermore at the beginning and the end of the tournament, we have $n = 0$. Thus, by taking $n \bmod{4}$ we find that the number of non-odd games must have been even.
The total number of games is $\binom{15}{2} = 105$, which is odd; thus, the number of odd games must be odd, and cannot be zero.
Yes. We will construct one such tournament inductively, starting with $3$ teams and adding $4$ teams each time.
With $3$ teams it's easy to check that absolutely any valid tournament has exactly one odd game.
Now, given a tournament for $t$ teams ($t$ must be odd), we'll add four teams $A, B, C, D$ without adding any odd games:
First, play the original $t$-team tournament. Every team has still played an even number of games.
Now play $AC, BD, AD, BC, AB$ in that order, so that $A$ and $B$ have both played an odd number of games, and $C$ and $D$ have both played an even number of games.
Label the other teams $T_1$ to $T_t$, and play
$CT_{2k-1}, AT_{2k-1}, DT_{2k-1}, BT_{2k-1}, AT_{2k}, CT_{2k}, BT_{2k}, CT_{2k}$ for $k = 1, 2, \ldots, \frac{t-1}{2}$
and
$CT_t, AT_t, DT_t, BT_t$
Finally play $CD$.