The Deletion Method

Abstract

As described in previous sections, the basic probabilistic method works as follows: trying to prove that an object with certain properties exists, one defines an appropriate probability space of objects and then shows that the desired properties hold in this space with positive probability. In this section, we consider situations where the “random” object does not have all the desired properties but may have a few “blemishes.” With a small alteration, we remove the blemishes, giving the desired structure.