Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum (HFFRF)


Bob and Doug McKenzie - The Wind Beneath our Wings!
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Bob: "Fleshy-headed mutant, are you friendly?"
Doug: "No way, eh! R-radiation has made me an enemy of civilization!"

The first (triannual?) Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum was held at the residence of Dr. Robert Gardner on July 30 to August 1, 2004. The intent of this forum is to expose the participants to some of the greatest films of all time, with intermittent episodes of combinatorial research.

The participant list for the 2004 gathering is as follows:

  1. Gary D. Coker
  2. Robert B. Gardner
Participants enjoyed the available beverages of Michelob Ultra and margaritas. Some of the cuisine served includes pizza and eggs scrambled the Alton Brown way. An obvious oversight was the absence of jelley doughnuts and back bacon.

The Films

The 2004 meeting was a great success! The following films were viewed:


Strange Brew
(The original film which inspired the Hoser Film Festival)

Batman - The Movie

Blazing Saddles

The Empire Strikes Back

Pee Wee's Big Adventure

Top Secret

Young Frankenstein

Cosmos, Episode 1, The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean

Unfortunately, the films we viewed on a small 27 inch TV. Future meetings will take advantage of the new 60 inch TV installed in the main meeting room (i.e. Robert's living room).

The Research

After much thought (and beers, eh?), the following problem was posed: Decompositions, Packings, and Coverings of the Complete Digraph the the Complete Digraph with a Hole into Alternating 6-Cycles. The alternating 6-cycle is sometimes denoted AC6. Decompositons of the complete digraph into copies of AC6 was studied by Varma. The proposed problems would extend Varma's work to packings and coverings, as well as to the complete digraph with a hole. Although these things are much less complicated when dealing with cycles of even length, the collection of problems proposed could take a good deal of time to solve.

UPDATE (2005): With time, the focus of the research has taken a shift. It appears that the undirected versions of these problems have not been solved. Initial work in this direction has been taken by Gardner and Nguyen in "4-Cycle Packings and Coverings of the Complete Graph with a Hole" (you can also find the relevant definitions in this work). It is hoped that the second Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum can be used to make progress on this new problem.

UPDATE (2007): A problem related to 6-cycle packings and coverings of the complete graph with a hole has been successfully completed and published. The paper is: Packing the Complete Bipartite Graph with Hexagons, Congressus Numerantium, 174 (2005) 97-106. It was coauthored by L. Brown, G. Coker, R. Gardner, and J. Kennedy. A preprint is available in PDF format. Covering the complete graph with hexagons is being addressed in the ETSU master's thesis of L. Brown, under the direction of R. Gardner. The undirected problem mentioned in the 2005 Update above is being studied by J. Kennedy and R. Gardner, in a project titled: Decomposing and Packing the Complete Graph with a Hole into Hexagons.

Relevant Websites

Some other websites of interest:

You Hoser
The McKenzie Brothers Web-site

NEWS FLASH: HFFRF2 PLANNED

The Second Triannual Hoser Film Festival and Research Forum is tentatively planned for July 2007! For details, click here.

Return to Bob Gardner's webpage.
Last updated: April 15, 2007.