Construction of nonconvertible \((0,1)\) matrices (Q2342353)

The author solves the problem of the existence of nonconvertible \((0,1)\)-matrices. Let \(M_n(0,1)\) be the set of square \((0,1)\)-matrices of order \(n\) and \(SM_n(0,1)\) denotes the set of symmetric elements of \(M_n(0,1)\). A matrix \(A \in M_n(0,1)\) is said to be convertible if there is a matrix \(X \in M_n(\pm 1)\) such that \[ \mathrm{per}(A)=\det{(A \circ X)}, \] where \(\circ\) denotes the elementwise multiplication of matrices, and \(\mathrm{per}\) and \(\det\) are the permanent and the determinant of a square matrix, respectively. In a similar way, a matrix \(A \in SM_n(0,1)\) is said to be symmetrically convertible if there is a matrix \(X \in SM_n(\pm 1)\) such that \(\text{per}(A)=\det{(A \circ X)}\). A matrix \(A \in M_n(0,1)\) is said to be weakly symmetrically convertible if there is a matrix \(X \in SM_n(\pm 1)\) such that \(\text{per}(A)= \pm \det{(A \circ X)}\). In this manuscript, for every admissible pair \((n, \nu)\), where \(\nu\) denotes the number of ones in a matrix \(A \in M_n(0,1)\), the author constructs nonconvertible matrices in the set \(M_n(0,1)\), whose permanent differs from zero. In addition, nonconvertible symmetric matrices are constructed. On the other hand, the author claims that, for \((n, \nu)=(4, 11)\), every symmetric matrix is weakly symmetrically convertible. For the other values of the pair of parameters \((n, \nu)\), examples of matrices that are not weakly symmetrically convertible are presented.