Cliques with many colors in triple systems

Abstract

Erdős and Hajnal constructed a 4-coloring of the triples of an $N$-element set such that every $n$-element subset contains 2 triples with distinct colors, and $N$ is double exponential in $n$. Conlon, Fox and Rodl asked whether there is some integer $q\ge 3$ and a $q$-coloring of the triples of an $N$-element set such that every $n$-element subset has 3 triples with distinct colors, and $N$ is double exponential in $n$. We make the first nontrivial progress on this problem by providing a $q$-coloring with this property for all $q\geq 9$, where $N$ is exponential in $n^{2+cq}$ and $c>0$ is an absolute constant.