Designs, permutations, and transitive groups

Abstract: A notion of

t

-designs in the symmetric group on

n

letters was introduced by Godsil in 1988. In particular

t

-transitive sets of permutations form a

t

-design. We derive special lower bounds for

t = 1

and

t = 2

by a power moment method. For general

n, t

we give a %linear programming lower bound . For

n g e 4

and

t = 2,

this bound is strong enough to show a lower bound on the size of such

t

-designs of

n (n - 1) d o t s (n - t + 1),

which is best possible when sharply

t

-transitive sets of permutations exist. This shows, in particular, that tight

2

-designs do not exist.

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