English

Probably Intersecting Families are Not Nested

Combinatorics 2011-08-30 v1

Abstract

It is well known that an intersecting family of subsets of an n-element set can contain at most 2^(n-1) sets. It is natural to wonder how `close' to intersecting a family of size greater than 2^(n-1) can be. Katona, Katona and Katona introduced the idea of a `most probably intersecting family.' Suppose that X is a family and that 0<p<1. Let X(p) be the (random) family formed by selecting each set in X independently with probability p. A family X is `most probably intersecting' if it maximises the probability that X(p) is intersecting over all families of size |X|. Katona, Katona and Katona conjectured that there is a nested sequence consisting of most probably intersecting families of every possible size. We show that this conjecture is false for every value of p provided that n is sufficiently large.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1108.5603,
  title  = {Probably Intersecting Families are Not Nested},
  author = {Paul A. Russell and Mark Walters},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1108.5603},
  year   = {2011}
}

Comments

19 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-21T18:56:14.725Z