English

On supersaturation for oddtown and eventown

Combinatorics 2023-07-18 v2

Abstract

We study the supersaturation problems of oddtown and eventown. Given a family A\mathcal A of subsets of an nn element set, let op(A)op(\mathcal A) denote the number of distinct pairs A,BAA,B\in \mathcal A for which AB|A \cap B| is odd. We show that if A\mathcal A consists of n+sn+s odd-sized subsets, then op(A)s+2op(\mathcal A)\geq s+2, which is tight when sn4s\le n-4. This disproves a conjecture by O'Neill on the supersaturation problem of oddtown. For the supersaturation problem of eventown, we show that for large enough nn, if A\mathcal A consists of 2n2+s2^{\lfloor \frac n 2\rfloor}+s even-sized subsets, then op(A)s2n21op(\mathcal A)\ge s\cdot2^{\lfloor \frac n 2\rfloor-1} for any positive integer s2n8ns\le \frac{2^{\lfloor\frac n 8\rfloor}} n. This partially proves a conjecture by O'Neill on the supersaturation problem of eventown. Previously, the correctness of this conjecture was only verified for s=1s=1 and 22. We further provide a twice weaker lower bound in this conjecture for eventown, that is op(A)s2n/22op(\mathcal{A})\ge s\cdot 2^{\lfloor n/2\rfloor-2} for general nn and ss by using discrete Fourier analysis. Finally, some asymptotic results for the lower bounds of op(A)op(\mathcal A) are given when ss is large for both problems.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2302.05586,
  title  = {On supersaturation for oddtown and eventown},
  author = {Xin Wei and Yuhao Zhao and Xiande Zhang and Gennian Ge},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.05586},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

16 pages, no figure

R2 v1 2026-06-28T08:37:33.626Z