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Counting Partitions (Posted on 2024-03-21) Difficulty: 3 of 5
The set of natural numbers 1 through N is to be partitioned into two subsets A and B, with one restriction:
The number of elements in A is not a member of A and the number of elements in B is not a member of B.

How many ways are there to make these partitions?

No Solution Yet Submitted by Brian Smith    
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Some Thoughts solution | Comment 1 of 3
My logic is flawed. The below is wrong:

A contains the cardinality of B, but not its own cardinality, so the split can't be equal.

if A has 1 element, it must be the cardinality of B:
  there's 1 choice (or rather, way).
  
if A has 2 elements, one is the cardinality of B, and there are N-2 choices for the other.

if A has 3 elements, one is the cardinality of B, and there are C(N-2,2) choices of the other two.

if A has 4 elements, one is the cardinality of B, and there are C(N-2,3) choices of the other two.

etc. through floor(N/2).

The same total of the above also applies to B if B is the smaller set, so the above total is doubled.
       
     N  partitions
     
     3     2
     4     4
     5     8
     6    14
     7    32
     8    54
     9   128
    10   214
    11   512
    12   856       
       
2*Sigma{a = 1 to floor(n/2)} C(n-2,a-1)       
       
Table- shown is from:    

for n = 3:12
  w=0;
  for a=1:floor(n/2)
    if a~=(n-2)/2
      ch=nchoosek(n-2,a-1);
      w=w+ch;
    end
  end
  disp([n,2*w])
end

Edited on March 21, 2024, 3:55 pm
  Posted by Charlie on 2024-03-21 13:45:01

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