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I have been trying to find a solution both theoretical and practical to my problem but I just can't. The question is you have x players that should play some rounds y of games in groups of 4. Now if a player was in a game with somebody else, he is not allowed to be ever again with that player in the same group. Now the question is give n groups that satisfy this conditions. With n being maximal amount of possible groups.

My first approach was to just take a player put him into a group, now for the next player check the array already_played_with_players of the first player for the second player if he's not in add him and add the players he played with to the already_played_with_players array. Proceed so too for the next two players. Then mark these 4 players as in a group and take the next player out of the pool and so on.

This is not some educational question, but a real world problem. I would like to organize a game tournament, but so that people meet new people and don't play with the same people again. I already ask multiple people mathematicians, physicians, computer scientist, but the solution was not really evident to anybody. So I was wondering if the problem is NP-complete? I know I would need to find a reduction from another NP-complete problem to my problem to prove that, but I don't even know how to formalize my problem exactly.

Hakaishin
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  • Let n = 16, and the initial Groups: {1234, 5678, 9abc, defg}, now player 1 can never be grouped with 2,3 and 4? So for every play for each player the number of possible team members decrease by 3? And the objective is to return the maximal number of groups possible (here the output is such grouping not a number)? – Evil Dec 24 '16 at 01:46
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    The objective is to return the maximal number of groups possible and a specific grouping being maximal. And yes you understood the question right. For 16 players there can be 3 rounds played. But for higher numbers the process get's difficult fast and for 16 I found it out more by guessing than by a formal method. – Hakaishin Dec 24 '16 at 03:09
  • I think there can be 5 rounds – skan Apr 04 '17 at 11:59
  • Can you elaborate and give a specific grouping please? – Hakaishin Apr 04 '17 at 15:59

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Your problem has been solved by Brouwer in 1979 in his paper Optimal Packings of $K_4$'s into a $K_n$. Quoting from his paper, let $$ J(2,4,v) = \begin{cases} \lfloor \frac{v}{4} \lfloor \frac{v-1}{3} \rfloor\rfloor - 1 & \text{if } v \equiv 7 \text{ or } 10 \pmod{12}, \\ \lfloor \frac{v}{4} \lfloor \frac{v-1}{3} \rfloor\rfloor & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} $$ The maximal number of groups when there are $v$ players, denoted $D(2,4,v)$, is equal to $J(2,4,v)$ unless $v \in \{9,10,17\}$, in which case $D(2,4,v) = J(2,4,v)-1$, and unless $v \in \{8,11,19\}$, in which case $D(2,4,v) = J(2,4,v)-2$.

The more general case in which every pair can appear at most $\lambda$ times has been solved by Assaf in his paper The packing of pairs by quadruples.

Yuval Filmus
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    Ah, excellent. This sure sounded like a graph problem someone should have already studied. – Kyle Jones Dec 24 '16 at 22:33
  • Isn't this the answer to another question? Shouldn't it be J(1, 4, v)? I tried to read the paper, but could not really understand the technicalities. Do they account in the paper, that if a player played with somebody in a group, he can not play again with any of them? So for example if player 1 plays with 2, 3, 4 he can not ever again play with 2, 3, 4? This about the maximum number of possible groups. But how would I go about actually finding such a maximal grouping of players? – Hakaishin Dec 25 '16 at 18:17
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    The parameter "2" here is not the number of occurrences, but rather the size of the set of players that cannot appear together in a group. In your case, any two players cannot appear more than once in a group. As for actually finding such a maximal grouping, presumably this is explained in the paper. – Yuval Filmus Dec 25 '16 at 18:18
  • As @Hakaishin said grouping 16 players into groups of 4 we have there can be 3 rounds played. How do we apply your equation to get that number. If I use v=16 I get J=20. – skan Apr 03 '17 at 18:48
  • You calculate $\lfloor \frac{16}{4} \lfloor \frac{15}{3} \rfloor \rfloor = 20$. – Yuval Filmus Apr 03 '17 at 19:28
  • @YuvalFilmus I thought the max number of rounds it's 3 because that was said before, but it's 5. Then how can I get that "5"?. Dividing 20 by the size of the groups (4) ? – skan Apr 04 '17 at 11:59
  • The formula I quote is for the number of groups. The number of rounds is at least the number of groups divided by 4. – Yuval Filmus Apr 04 '17 at 12:57
  • When you say unless v∈{9,10,17} do you mean also mod 12? – skan Apr 04 '17 at 18:35
  • No, this is just $v=9$, $v=10$, or $v=17$. – Yuval Filmus Apr 04 '17 at 18:54
  • What's the maximal number of groups if we have 64 players in groups of 8? – skan Sep 14 '18 at 11:17
  • This can apparently be deduced from Assaf’s paper. – Yuval Filmus Sep 14 '18 at 15:10