How many distinct pair of boxes of exact size = 2 can I form from $n$ distinct elements

combinatorics

Drawing some diagrams and pyramids (and to better explain the problem), I obtained the following results:

  • For the minimum case of 4 distinct balls $\lbrace1,2,3,4\rbrace$, there are 3 possible cases.

    $\lbrace 12|34, 13|24, 14|23 \rbrace$

  • For 5 distinct balls $\lbrace 1,2,3,4,5 \rbrace$, there are 15 cases.

    $\lbrace 12|34, 13|24, 14|23, 12|35, 13|25, 15|23, 12|54, 15|24, 14|25, 15|34, 13|54, 14|53, 25|34, 35|24, 45|23 \rbrace$

  • And for 6 distinct balls $\lbrace 1,2,3,4,5,6 \rbrace $, I manually counted 45 cases.

As you may noticed, no configuration of boxes and no element should be repeated.

What is the combinatorial function (depending on the $n$ number of distinct balls) that models this problem? I would appreciate any kind of help.

EDIT 1: edited title, I would like to count the possible configurations of pair of boxes

EDIT 2: updated counting result for the case $n=6$.

Best Answer

Revised in response to the clarification.

There are $\binom{n}2$ different pairs. Once we’ve chosen one of them, there are $\binom{n-2}2$ ways to choose a pair from the remaining $n-2$ balls, so there are $\binom{n}2\binom{n-2}2$ ordered pairs of boxes with disjoint contents. Since we want unordered pairs of boxes, this has to be divided by $2$: there are

$$\frac12\binom{n}2\binom{n-2}2=\frac{n(n-1)(n-2)(n-3)}{8}$$

possible pairs of boxes with disjoint contents.

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