English

On a Conjecture of Butler and Graham

Combinatorics 2011-11-28 v2 Discrete Mathematics

Abstract

Motivated by a hat guessing problem proposed by Iwasawa \cite{Iwasawa10}, Butler and Graham \cite{Butler11} made the following conjecture on the existence of certain way of marking the {\em coordinate lines} in [k]n[k]^n: there exists a way to mark one point on each {\em coordinate line} in [k]n[k]^n, so that every point in [k]n[k]^n is marked exactly aa or bb times as long as the parameters (a,b,n,k)(a,b,n,k) satisfies that there are non-negative integers ss and tt such that s+t=kns+t = k^n and as+bt=nkn1as+bt = nk^{n-1}. In this paper we prove this conjecture for any prime number kk. Moreover, we prove the conjecture for the case when a=0a=0 for general kk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1107.2027,
  title  = {On a Conjecture of Butler and Graham},
  author = {Tengyu Ma and Xiaoming Sun and Huacheng Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1107.2027},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

9 pages, typos corrected, submitted to journal