An Evans-style result for block designs
Abstract
For positive integers and with , an -design is a pair where is a set of points and is a collection of -subsets of called blocks such that each pair of points occur together in exactly one block. If we weaken this condition to demand only that each pair of points occur together in at most one block, then the resulting object is a partial -design. A completion of a partial -design is a (complete) -design such that . Here, for all sufficiently large , we determine exactly the minimum number of blocks in an uncompletable partial -design. This result is reminiscent of Evans' now-proved conjecture on completions of partial latin squares. We also prove some related results concerning edge decompositions of almost complete graphs into copies of .
Cite
@article{arxiv.2006.00898,
title = {An Evans-style result for block designs},
author = {Ajani De Vas Gunasekara and Daniel Horsley},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.00898},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
17 pages, 0 figures