Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-mathematics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2004/iii/paper-2/6/b/solution

Represent a subset by the coordinate vector of its indicator function in . Symmetric difference then becomes coordinatewise addition, and the proposed pairing is the dot product
It is a symmetric bilinear form, and it is nondegenerate because its Gram matrix in the singleton basis is the identity. Coordinate permutations preserve the sum, so the natural action preserves the bilinear form.
Let , the vector representing the full set. Then
is the even-weight subspace. For even , in , so . Moreover for , making the restricted bilinear form alternating. Nondegeneracy on the ambient space implies , so the radical of is exactly
Thus it descends to an alternating bilinear form on , independent of the representatives, and that quotient form has zero radical. The induced form is nondegenerate, and its dimension is . This is the symplectic quotient of the binary subset module; at it is the zero-dimensional nondegenerate space.

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