English

Suitable sets of permutations, packings of triples, and Ramsey's theorem

Combinatorics 2018-08-10 v1

Abstract

A set of NN permutations of {1,2,,v}\{1,2,\ldots,v\} is tt-suitable, if each symbol precedes each subset of t1t-1 others in at least one permutation. The extremal problem of determining the smallest size NN of such sets for given vv and tt was the subject of classical studies by Dushnik in 1950 and Spencer in 1971. Colbourn recently introduced the concept of suitable cores as equivalent objects of suitable sets of permutations, and studied the dual problem of determining the largest v=SCN(t,N)v=\text{SCN}(t,N) such that a suitable core exists for given tt and NN. Chan and Jedwab showed that when N=t+12t+12+lN=\lfloor\frac{t+1}{2}\rfloor\lceil\frac{t+1}{2}\rceil+l, the value of SCN(t,N)(t,N) is asymptotically t2+2\lfloor\frac{t}{2}\rfloor+2 if ll is a fixed integer. In this paper, we improve this result by showing that it is also true when l=O(lnt)l=O(\ln t) using Ramsey theory. When vv is bigger than t2+2\lfloor\frac{t}{2}\rfloor+2, we give new explicit constructions of suitable cores from packings of triples, and random constructions from extended Ramsey colorings.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1808.03159,
  title  = {Suitable sets of permutations, packings of triples, and Ramsey's theorem},
  author = {Xiande Zhang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1808.03159},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

19 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1603.02807 by other authors