Tasting out new flavors

A new ice cream parlor has 4 flavors: Vanilla, Chocolate, Strawberry, and Butterscotch. They want to give 4 customers (Alice, Bob, Carol, and David) free samples of their ice creams to get feedback under the following constraints:

  • They want each customer to taste 2 flavors.
  • They want each flavor to have been tasted by 2 customers.

For example, here is one way they could achieve this:

Alice Bob Carol David
Vanilla ✔️ ✔️
Chocolate ✔️ ✔️
Strawberry ✔️ ✔️
Butterscotch ✔️ ✔️

But what if the parlor came up with 7 flavors and 7 customers? Suppose they wanted

  • each customer to taste 3 flavors;
  • each flavor to have been tasted by 3 customers.

Would it still be possible?

Yes No

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2 solutions

Romain Bouchard
Mar 6, 2018

Here is a solution :

Alice Bob Carole David Elio Frank Gillian
Vanilla ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Strawberry ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Chocolate ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Butterscotch ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Pistachio ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Stracciatella ✔️ ✔️ ✔️
Peppermint ✔️ ✔️ ✔️

Good job! Is it possible to give a better characterization to when such an arrangement is possible?

Agnishom Chattopadhyay - 3 years, 3 months ago
David Vreken
Mar 9, 2018

Here is another solution:

Alice Bob Carole David Emily Fred Gina
Vanilla x x x
Chocolate x x x
Strawberry x x x
Butterscotch x x x
Mint x x x
Oreo x x x
Neapolitan x x x

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