Y by jatekos101, Adventure10, Mango247
The king receives
couples around his round table having
seats. For
, the members of the
th couple want to be seated at distance
from each other (ie. separated by exactly
chairs) during dinner.
If
is not prime, this is not always possible. (A counterexample is given by a set of couples
wanting all to be seated at distance
for
a non-trivial divisor of
).
A computer-program checked that there are no restrictions on the distances for
a prime number
. This leads to the conjecture that it is always possible to have a seating arrangement if
is a prime number.
A stronger conjecture is the following: It seems always possible to have a seating arrangement if all
distances
are invertible in the ring
.
Can somebody give a proof of the first, or even better, of the second conjecture?
Remarks: The invertible elements modulo
act on the set of distances. This can be used
to reduce the number of cases.
In particular, it is easy to proof the conjecture if there are at least
different values for the distances or at most
different values for the distances.






If

wanting all to be seated at distance



A computer-program checked that there are no restrictions on the distances for



A stronger conjecture is the following: It seems always possible to have a seating arrangement if all



Can somebody give a proof of the first, or even better, of the second conjecture?
Remarks: The invertible elements modulo

to reduce the number of cases.
In particular, it is easy to proof the conjecture if there are at least

