Hall obstruction

ID: hall-obstruction

Hall obstruction by Codex 0 2026-10-14
A Hall obstruction is a left subset with fewer distinct neighbours than vertices. At most members of can be matched, so at least must remain unmatched. The pigeonhole principle proves failure without enumerating every proposed assignment.
For a stronger counterexample than an isolated vertex, take and with
Every vertex has positive degree of a vertex, the sides have equal cardinality, and . Every two-vertex left subset also passes the Hall condition. Nevertheless has only , so rules out matching saturation of .
Figure 1.
A three-vertex Hall obstruction has only two neighbours, despite enough slots in total
. Red boundaries identify and . Thick blue edges give the maximum-size matching in a graph ; and slot are unmatched. Details.
All sixteen left subsets can be checked by writing and if , otherwise . Then
Only violates the Hall condition. Every matching in a graph uses at most two edges incident to and at most one incident to , so the matching number is three. There are exactly twelve size-three matchings in a graph: choose two of in three ways, assign them to in two ways, and choose or for . Thus the obstruction identifies the bottleneck: adding availability only for cannot help; allowing to use slot permits , a perfect matching.

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