A blocking set in an affine plane is a set of points $B$ such that every line contains at least one point of $B$. The best known lower bound for blocking sets in arbitrary (non-desarguesian) affine planes was derived in the 1980's by Bruen and Silverman. In this note, we improve on this result by showing that a blocking set of an affine plane of order $q$, $q\geq 25$, contains at least $q+\lfloor\sqrt{q}\rfloor+3$ points.
We investigate the upper chromatic number of the hypergraph formed by the points and the $k$-dimensional subspaces of $\mathrm{PG}(n,q)$; that is, the most number of colors that can be used to color the points so that every $k$-subspace contains at least two points of the same color. Clearly, if one colors the points of a double blocking set with the same color, the rest of the points may get mutually distinct colors. This gives a trivial lower bound, and we prove that it is sharp in many cases. Due to this relation with double blocking sets, we also prove that for $t\leq \frac38p+1$, a small …
Minimal codes are being intensively studied in last years. $[n,k]_{q}$-minimal linear codes are in bijection with strong blocking sets of size $n$ in $PG(k-1,q)$ and a lower bound for the size of strong blocking sets is given by $(k-1)(q+1)\leq n$. In this note we show that all strong blocking sets of length 9 in $PG(3,2)$ are the hyperbolic quadrics $Q^{+}(3,2)$.
Minimal linear codes are in one-to-one correspondence with special types of blocking sets of projective spaces over a finite field, which are called strong or cutting blocking sets. In this paper we prove an upper bound on the minimal length of minimal codes of dimension $k$ over the $q$-element Galois field which is linear in both $q$ and $k$, hence improve the previous superlinear bounds. This result determines the minimal length up to a small constant factor. We also improve the lower and upper bounds on the size of so called higgledy-piggledy line sets in projective spaces and apply these …
Let $\mathcal{H}$ be an $r$-uniform hypergraph. The Turán number $\text{ex}(n,\mathcal{H})$ is the maximum number of edges in an $n$-vertex $\mathcal{H}$-free $r$-uniform hypergraph. The Turán density of $\mathcal{H}$ is defined by \[π(\mathcal{H})=\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{\text{ex}(n,\mathcal{H})}{\binom{n}{r}}.\] In this paper, we consider the Turán density of projective geometries. We give two new constructions of $PG_{m}(q)$-free hypergraphs which improve some results given by Keevash (J. Combin. Theory Ser. A, 111: 289--309, 2005). Based on an upper bound of blocking sets of $PG_m(q…
The Sum-of-Squares (SoS) hierarchy is a semi-definite programming meta-algorithm that captures state-of-the-art polynomial time guarantees for many optimization problems such as Max-$k$-CSPs and Tensor PCA. On the flip side, a SoS lower bound provides evidence of hardness, which is particularly relevant to average-case problems for which NP-hardness may not be available. In this paper, we consider the following average case problem, which we call the \emph{Planted Affine Planes} (PAP) problem: Given $m$ random vectors $d_1,\ldots,d_m$ in $\mathbb{R}^n$, can we prove that there is no vector $v …
