Olympiad problems

2024 Indonesia Regional, 2

Tags: domino , combinatorics , Chessboard , board , Boards , Indonesia , RMO

Given an $n \times n$ board which is divided into $n^2$ squares of size $1 \times 1$, all of which are white. Then, Aqua selects several squares from this board and colors them black. Ruby then places exactly one $1\times 2$ domino on the board, so that the domino covers exactly two squares on the board. Ruby can rotate the domino into a $2\times 1$ domino. After Aqua colors, it turns out there are exactly $2024$ ways for Ruby to place a domino on the board so that it covers exactly $1$ black square and $1$ white square. Determine the smallest possible value of $n$ so that Aqua and Ruby can do this. [i]Proposed by Muhammad Afifurrahman, Indonesia [/i]

2019 Belarusian National Olympiad, 11.8

Tags: combinatorics , Boards

At each node of the checkboard $n\times n$ board, a beetle sat. At midnight, each beetle crawled into the center of a cell. It turned out that the distance between any two beetles sitting in the adjacent (along the side) nodes didn't increase. Prove that at least one beetle crawled into the center of a cell at the vertex of which it sat initially. [i](A. Voidelevich)[/i]

2017 Lusophon Mathematical Olympiad, 5

Tags: combinatorics , Boards

The unit cells of a 5 x 5 board are painted with 5 colors in a way that every cell is painted by exactly one color and each color is used in 5 cells. Show that exists at least one line or one column of the board in which at least 3 colors were used.