Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.
Updated
Claim. Every set of 30 points in the plane in general position contains six points in convex position with no point of the set inside their convex hull. Overmars's set of 29 points without an empty convex hexagon shows that 30 is sharp, so . The paper's second theorem adds that every set of 24 points in general position contains an empty convex hexagon or a convex heptagon.
Covers. The value , which answers the estimation half of the question at the largest for which exists. The existence of was known from the independent proofs of Nicolás and Gerken; Gerken's argument bounds it by the number of points forcing a convex 9-gon, at most 1717 by Tóth and Valtr's bound. The smaller values are and (Harborth). The nonexistence of for is Horton's result.
Method. The proof is a computer search. The authors encode the existence
of convex -gons and empty convex -gons in a point set with
clauses instead of the usual , prove the statement for
counterclockwise systems (the combinatorial abstraction of a point set, so
the bound holds for the geometric sets as a special case), partition the
search so that it runs in parallel, and check the unsatisfiability results
with clausal proof checking. The paper states its own caveats: the basic
encoding is trusted, with no mechanically verified proof of its correctness;
the check of the symmetry-breaking step was run only for point sets of at most
10 points; and most, not all, of the results were proof-checked. The Lean
development of Subercaseaux, Nawrocki, Gallicchio, Codel, Carneiro and Heule
(Formal verification of the empty hexagon number, arXiv:2403.17370, posted
2024-03-26, linked above, pinned to a commit), which presents itself as a
verification of this result, proves in Lean that the encoding and the symmetry
breaking are correct, so that the unsatisfiability of the formula for 30 points
implies the theorem; that unsatisfiability stays a hypothesis of its main
theorem, discharged by the checked clausal proof. The corpus has not built the
development, so it gives no formalized evidence. The
source card
summarizes the encoding and the two theorems.
Acceptance. The paper is refereed: M. J. H. Heule and M. Scheucher, Happy Ending: An Empty Hexagon in Every Set of 30 Points, Tools and Algorithms for the Construction and Analysis of Systems (TACAS 2024), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer (2024), 61–80. The venue is a conference proceedings; the publisher's Crossref record of the chapter carries the conference organizers' peer-review information, a double-blind review of 159 submissions with 53 full papers accepted, which is the evidence that the volume was refereed. The curator of erdosproblems.com, Thomas Bloom, records on the problem page with this paper as its source; the site's label, disproved, rests on Horton's result, so that remark is not acceptance of this partial claim.