A few more balanced Room squares

Abstract

AbstractThe existence problem for balanced Room squares is, in general, unsolved. Recently, B. A. Anderson gave a construction for a class of these designs with side 2n − 1, where n is odd and n ≥ 3. For n even, the existence has not yet been settled. In this paper, we use the affine geometry of dimension 2 k and order 2, and a hill-climbing algorithm, to construct a number of new balanced Room squares directly. Recursive techniques based on finite geometries then give new squares of side 22k − 1 for infinitely many values of k.