Probably Intersecting Families are Not Nested
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}
}
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19 pages