English

Counting tournament score sequences

Combinatorics 2023-01-18 v2

Abstract

The score sequence of a tournament is the sequence of the out-degrees of its vertices arranged in nondecreasing order. The problem of counting score sequences of a tournament with nn vertices is more than 100 years old (MacMahon 1920). In 2013 Hanna conjectured a surprising and elegant recursion for these numbers. We settle this conjecture in the affirmative by showing that it is a corollary to our main theorem, which is a factorization of the generating function for score sequences with a distinguished index. We also derive a closed formula and a quadratic time algorithm for counting score sequences.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2209.03925,
  title  = {Counting tournament score sequences},
  author = {Anders Claesson and Mark Dukes and Atli Fannar Franklín and Sigurður Örn Stefánsson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2209.03925},
  year   = {2023}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-28T00:58:24.268Z