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Thomas Britz
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Nicholas J. Cavenagh
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Henrik Kragh Sørensen
Keywords:
Maximal partial Latin cube, bound, construction, transversal
Abstract
We prove that each maximal partial Latin cube must have more than $29.289\%$ of its cells filled and show by construction that this is a nearly tight bound. We also prove upper and lower bounds on the number of cells containing a fixed symbol in maximal partial Latin cubes and hypercubes, and we use these bounds to determine for small orders $n$ the numbers $k$ for which there exists a maximal partial Latin cube of order $n$ with exactly $k$ entries. Finally, we prove that maximal partial Latin cubes of order $n$ exist of each size from approximately half-full ($n^3/2$ for even $n\geq 10$ and $(n^3+n)/2$ for odd $n\geq 21$) to completely full, except for when either precisely $1$ or $2$ cells are empty.