In a group of $2n$ students, each student has exactly $3$ friends within the group. The friendships are mutual and for each two students $A$ and $B$ which are not friends, there is a sequence $C_1, C_2, ..., C_r$ of students such that $A$ is a friend of $C_1$, $C_1$ is a friend of $C_2$, et cetera, and $C_r$ is a friend of $B$. Every student was asked to assess each of his three friendships with: "acquaintance", "friend" and "BFF". It turned out that each student either gave the same assessment to all of his friends or gave every assessment exactly once. We say that a pair of students is in conflict if they gave each other different assessments. Let $D$ be the set of all possible values of the total number of conflicts. Prove that $|D| \geq 3n$ with equality if and only if the group can be partitioned into two subsets such that each student is separated from all of his friends.
Problem
Source: 5th Memorial Mathematical Competition "Aleksandar Blazhevski - Cane" - Senior - Problem 6
Tags: graph theory, combinatorics