Group divisible designs in MOLS of order ten (Q2448073)

A famous open problem is to determine \(N(10)\), the cardinality of the largest set of mutually orthogonal Latin squares of order 10. It is known that \(2\leq N(10)\leq 6\). This paper proposes an interesting approach to trying to show that \(N(10)<4\). If \(N(10)\geq 4\) then there is a transversal design \(\mathrm{TD}(6,10)\) and also a 6-net \(N\) of order 10. The key observation in this paper is that the characteristic vectors of the lines of \(N\) span a \(\mathbb{Z}_2\)-vector space of dimension at most 53. As a consequence there are at least two unexpected ``relations'', that is, sets of lines which meet each point in \(N\) an even number of times. The authors use these relations to deduce the existence of one of 12 different group divisible designs embedded in the \(\mathrm{TD}(6,10)\). They then show that one of the \(12\) options is infeasible. If the other 11 could be ruled out, it would show that \(N(10)<4\).