Putting Dots in Triangles

Simon R. Blackburn1, Maura B. Paterson2, Douglas R. Stinson3
1Royal Holloway, University of London Egham, Surrey TW20 OTN, United Kingdom
2Birkbeck College, University of London Malet Street, London WC1E 7HX, United Kingdom
3David R. Cheriton School of Computer Science University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, N2L 3G1, Canada

Abstract

Given a right-angled triangle of squares in a grid whose horizontal and vertical sides are \( n \) squares long, let \( N(n) \) denote the maximum number of dots that can be placed into the cells of the triangle such that each row, each column, and each diagonal parallel to the long side of the triangle contains at most one dot. It has been proven that \( N_f(n) = \lfloor \frac{2n+1}{3} \rfloor \). In this note, we give a new proof of the upper bound \( N_f(n) \leq \lfloor \frac{2n+1}{3} \rfloor \) using linear programming techniques.