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35 votes
1 answer
765 views

What measurable quantity can constrain the number of odors human can discriminate?

This is not a very typical MO question, but I hope you bear with me. It concerns a recent disagreement in the biology literature about how many different odors humans can discriminate. The authors of ...
Yoav Kallus's user avatar
  • 5,928
4 votes
1 answer
1k views

"Codes" in which a group of words are pairwise different at a certain position

I read the following problem, claimed to be in the IMO shortlist in 1988: A test consists of four multiple choice problems, each with three options, and the students should give an unique answer to ...
Hao Chen's user avatar
  • 2,521
2 votes
2 answers
762 views

Minimally intersecting subsets of fixed size

The question I have, is how to generate the following collection of subsets: Given a set $S$ of size $n$. I want to find a sequence of $k$ subsets of fixed size $m$, $0<m<n$, such that at each ...
Jim's user avatar
  • 145
2 votes
0 answers
82 views

Packings with block size equal to $6$?

In design theory the following is the defintion of a packing : Definition : A $(v,k)$-packing is a pair $(V, \mathcal{B})$ of a finite set $V$ of cardinality $\vert V \vert = v$ and a finite set $\...
Elaqqad's user avatar
  • 203
1 vote
1 answer
123 views

On the existence of symmetric matrices with prescribed number of 1's on each row

We are considering the following problem: Given an integer $n$ and a sequence of integers $r_i,\ 1\le i\le n$, with $0\le r_i\le n-1$ does there exists a symmetric matrix $A$ such that the diagonal ...
Jeremiah's user avatar