We color each unit square of a table $10\times 10$ with one color so that …

coloringcombinatoricscontest-mathdiscrete mathematicsgraph theory

A table $10\times 10$ is divided in $100$ unit squares. We color each unit square with one color so that no column or row contains more than $5$ colors. How many colors can we use at most?

Any idea how to solve it with more graph theoretical aproach?

Wrong: I was thinking about to define a graph with $100$ vertices and two are connected if they are of the sam color and in the same line (row or column).Then each component is exactly the set of all vertices of the same color and thus we need to find a maximum number of components…

Best Answer

We claim the answer is $41$. To see that we can indeed reach $41$ colours, just choose $4$ diagonals and colour each square on those diagonals with a different colour, resulting in $40$ colours, and every other square with the $41$st colour.

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Suppose there exist two rows that share no colours. That gives at most $10$ different colours, but seeing as each column can only get us $3$ new colours, we reah a bound of $10+3\cdot 10=40<41$.

Now suppose every two rows share a colour. In particular, every row shares a colour with the first row. That gives us at most $5$ new colours in the first row and at most $4$ in the following $9$ rows, with $5+9\cdot 4=41$ colours in total.

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