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arXiv · 2209.03925

Counting tournament score sequences

Anders Claesson·Mark Dukes·Atli Fannar Franklín·Sigurður Örn Stefánsson
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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 $n$ 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.

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Anders Claesson, Mark Dukes, Atli Fannar Franklín, Sigurður Örn Stefánsson. 2022-09-08. Counting tournament score sequences. https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.03925

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