Anti-van der Waerden numbers of 3-term arithmetic progression (Q2363101)

Summary: The \textit{anti-van der Waerden number}, denoted by \(\mathrm{aw}([n],k)\), is the smallest \(r\) such that every exact \(r\)-coloring of \([n]\) contains a rainbow \(k\)-term arithmetic progression. Butler et. al. showed that \(\lceil \log_3 n \rceil + 2 \leq \mathrm{aw}([n],3) \leq \lceil \log_2 n \rceil + 1\), and conjectured that there exists a constant \(C\) such that \(\mathrm{aw}([n],3) \leq \lceil \log_3 n \rceil + C\). In this paper, we show this conjecture is true by determining \(\mathrm{aw}([n],3)\) for all \(n\). We prove that for \(7\cdot 3^{m-2}+1 \leq n \leq 21 \cdot 3^{m-2}\), \[ \mathrm{aw}([n],3)=\begin{cases} m+2, & \text{if}\,\,n=3^m \\ m+3, & \text{otherwise}. \end{cases} \]