Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-graph-theory-and-probabilistic-combinatorics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2011/b/5/a/solution
Past exam of the graph Theory and Probabilistic Combinatorics course of the University of Oxford 2011 B 5 a Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-31
A dependency digraph has vertices and no loops. For each , the event must be independent of the sigma-algebra generated jointly by all with for which there is no edge . Joint independence from that collection is required; pairwise independence alone does not suffice.
Write for the outneighbours of , and . We prove by induction on that has positive probability and, when ,For , the asserted conditional bound follows from the hypothesis, since its product factors are at most one. For the induction step, positivity for a set of size follows by writing its avoidance probability as a chain product: all preceding conditioning sets have size below , so each factor is at least .
Now take , split and , and condition first on . Independence gives . Moreover, order the elements of and use the inductive conditional bounds on the successive avoidance factors. Their conditioning sets have size at most , soThis remains true when is empty, with both sides one. ThereforeThe induction is complete. Finally expand the probability of avoiding all events in the order :This proves the asymmetric Lovász local lemma, including the positivity needed to make every conditioning step legitimate.
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