We give a new proof of the Frankl-Rödl theorem on forbidden intersections, via the probabilistic method of dependent random choice. Our method extends to codes with forbidden distances, where over large alphabets our bound is significantly better than that obtained by Frankl and Rödl. We also apply our bound to a question of Ellis on sets of permutations with forbidden distances, and to establish a weak form of a conjecture of Alon, Shpilka and Umans on sunflowers.

Let A be a family of subsets of an n-set such that A does not contain distinct sets A and B with |A\B| = 2|B\A|. How large can A be? Our aim in this note is to determine the maximum size of such an A. This answers a question of Kalai. We also give some related results and conjectures.

A Hamilton cycle in a digraph is a cycle that passes through all the vertices, where all the arcs are oriented in the same direction. The problem of finding Hamilton cycles in directed graphs is well studied and is known to be hard. One of the main reasons for this, is that there is no general tool for finding Hamilton cycles in directed graphs comparable to the so called Posá 'rotation-extension' technique for the undirected analogue. Let D(n, p) denote the random digraph on vertex set [n], obtained by adding each directed edge independently with probability p. Here we present a general and a very simple method, using known results, to attack problems of packing and counting Hamilton cycles in random directed graphs, for every edge-probability p > log C (n)/n. Our results are asymptotically optimal with respect to all parameters and apply equally well to the undirected case.

A well-known theorem of Chung and Graham states that if h ≥ 4 then a tournament T is quasirandom if and only if T contains each h-vertex tournament the 'correct number' of times as a subtournament. In this paper we investigate the relationship between quasirandomness of T and the count of a single h-vertex tournament H in T . We consider two types of counts, the global one and the local one.We first observe that if T has the correct global count of H and h ≥ 7 then quasirandomness of T is only forced if H is transitive. The next natural question when studying quasirandom objects asks whether possessing the correct local counts of H is enough to force quasirandomness of T . A tournament H is said to be locally forcing if it has this property.Variants of the local forcing problem have been studied before in both the graph and hypergraph settings. Perhaps the closest analogue of our problem was considered by Simonovits and Sós who looked at whether having 'correct counts' of a fixed graph H as an induced subgraph of G implies G must be quasirandom, in an appropriate sense. They proved that this is indeed the case when H is regular and conjectured that it holds for all H (except the path on 3 vertices). Contrary to the Simonovits-Sós conjecture, in the tournament setting we prove that a constant proportion of all tournaments are not locally forcing. In fact, any locally forcing tournament must itself be strongly quasirandom. On the other hand, unlike the global forcing case, we construct infinite families of non-transitive locally forcing tournaments.