Structure of singular and nonsingular tournament matrices

Abstract

A tournament is a directed graph resulting from an orientation of the complete graph; so, if $M$ is a tournament's adjacency matrix, then $M + M^T$ is a matrix with $0$s on its diagonal and all other entries equal to $1$. An outstanding question in tournament theory asks to classify the adjacency matrices of tournaments which are singular (or nonsingular). We study this question using the structure of tournaments as graphs, in particular their cycle structure. More specifically, we find, as precisely as possible, the number of cycles of length three that dictates whether the corresponding tournament matrix is singular or nonsingular. We also give structural classifications of the tournaments that have the specified numbers of cycles of length three.