Abstract
In the court of King Arthur1 there dwelt 150 knights and 150 ladies-in-waiting. The king decided to marry them off, but the trouble was that some pairs hated each other so much that they would not get married, let alone speak! King Arthur tried several times to pair them off but each time he ran into conflicts. So he summoned Merlin the Wizard and ordered him to find a pairing in which every pair was willing to marry. Now, Merlin had supernatural powers, and he saw immediately that none of the 150! possible pairings was feasible, and this he told the king. But Merlin was not only a great wizard, but a suspicious character as well, and King Arthur did not quite trust him. “Find a pairing or I shall sentence you to be imprisoned in a cave forever!” said Arthur.
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© 2003 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC
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Lovász, L., Pelikán, J., Vesztergombi, K. (2003). A Glimpse of Complexity and Cryptography. In: Discrete Mathematics. Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21777-0_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-21777-0_15
Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY
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