On blocking sets in affine planes (Q795333)

This paper is concerned with blocking sets in affine planes and constitutes a companion to the authors' paper reviewed above. One of the main results asserts that in any affine plane of order \(q\geq 5\) there exists a blocking set with exactly k elements for every k with \(2q-1\leq k\leq(q-1)^ 2.\) The authors also give an upper bound for the number of points in an irreducible blocking set of \(AG(2,q),\) characterize the (essentially unique) blocking set in \(AG(2,4)\) and exhibit various examples of blocking sets in \(AG(2,q)\) as well as in \(PG(2,q).\)