Existence of Z-cyclic 3PDTWh(p) for Prime p ≡ 1 (mod 4)

A directed triplewhist tournament on p players over Z _p is said to have the three-person property if no two games in the tournament have three common players. We briefly denote such a design as a 3PDTWh(p). In this paper, we investigate the existence of a Z-cyclic 3PDTWh(p) for any prime p ≡ 1 (mod 4) and show that such a design exists whenever p ≡ 5, 9, 13 (mod 16) and p ≥ 29. This result is obtained by applying Weil’s theorem. In addition, we also prove that a Z-cyclic 3PDTWh(p) exists whenever p ≡ 1 (mod 16) and p < 10, 000 except possibly for p = 257, 769. Gennian Ge’s Research was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 10471127, Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. R604001, and the Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars, State Education Ministry.