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Discrete mathAnswered question
seiyakou2005n1 seiyakou2005n1 2022-05-22

Problem of selection from overlapping sets
For a positive integer m, let A 1 , , A m be (not necessarily disjoint and potentially empty) finite sets and let c 1 , , c m be non-negative integers. Suppose that
- each set A i contains at least c i elements; and
- the union i = 1 m A i contains precisely i = 1 m c i elements.
Intuitively, it should be possible to choose precisely c i elements from each A i in such a way that no element is picked twice. Formally, what I want to prove is that there exist sets ( B i ) i = 1 m such that
- B i A i for each i;
- the cardinality of B i is precisely c i for each i; and
- B i B j = for i j.
I tried induction on the number of sets. The case m = 2 is pretty straightforward. (Assign A 1 A 2 to B 1 , assign A 2 A 1 to B 2 , and divvy up A 1 A 2 between B 1 and B 2 ; this can be done in the desired way, so that # B 1 = c 1 and # B 2 = c 2 .) But then I got stuck with having the induction hypothesis carry over.
In particular, the main difficulty is that if i = 1 m + 1 A i contains i = 1 m + 1 c i elements, this does not necessarily imply that the smaller union i = 1 m A i contains precisely i = 1 m c i elements, as the sets are not necessarily disjoint. This makes the inductive proof more difficult, and a non-inductive proof (relying on, say, inclusion-exclusion) seems prohibitively complicated.
I am hoping that someone reading this may have an ingenious shortcut in mind as to how to make the induction hypothesis go through.

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