Caps and colouring Steiner triple systems (Q1378862)

It has been shown [\textit{R. Hill}, Discrete Math. 22, 111-137 (1978; Zbl 0391.51005)], that the largest cap (collection of points no 3 of which are collinear) in \(\text{PG}(5,3)\) (the projective geometry of dimension \(n\) over the field of order 3) has cardinality 56. Using this cap it is easy to construct a cap of cardinality 45 in \(\text{AG}(5,3)\) (the corresponding affine geometry). In this paper it is shown that the size of a cap in \(\text{AG}(5,3)\) is bounded above by 48. The authors also give an example of three disjoint 45-caps in \(\text{AG}(5,3)\). Then, using these two results they prove that the Steiner triple system \(\text{AG}(5,3)\) is 6-chromatic; that is, each of its points can be coloured by one of six colours so that no block has all its points the same colour, and this cannot be achieved with five colours. This is the first specific example of a 6-chromatic Steiner triple system.