The number of irreducible tournaments
Elizabeth Mary Wright · Glasgow Mathematical Journal · 1970
An n-tournament is a set of n labelled points, each pair A, B of which is joined either by the oriented line AB or by the oriented line BA. There are N = n(n –1)/2 such pairs and so Fn different n-tournaments, where Fn = 2N. A tournament is reducible if the points can be separated into two non-empty subsets and ℬ, such that every line joining a point in to a point in ℬ is directed towards the point in ℬ. Rado [3] showed that an irreducible tournamentis strongly connected; i.e. for every ordered pair of points A, B, there is a sequence of correctly oriented lines AC1, C1C2, …, ChB in the tournament, and conversely that a strongly connected tournament is irreducible.