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Research notes on every problem, and a library of the papers behind them. Built from the open erdos repository.

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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 g(6)=30g(6)=30. 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 g(6)=30g(6)=30, which answers the estimation half of the question at the largest kk for which g(k)g(k) exists. The existence of g(6)g(6) 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 g(4)=5g(4)=5 and g(5)=10g(5)=10 (Harborth). The nonexistence of g(k)g(k) for k≥7k\ge7 is Horton's result.

Method. The proof is a computer search. The authors encode the existence of convex kk-gons and empty convex kk-gons in a point set with O(n4)O(n^4) clauses instead of the usual O(nk)O(n^k), 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 g(6)=30g(6)=30 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.