Found problems: 357
Each rational number is painted either white or red. Call such a coloring of the rationals [i]sanferminera[/i] if for any distinct rationals numbers $x$ and $y$ satisfying one of the following three conditions: [list=1][*]$xy=1$,
[*]$x+y=0$,
[*]$x+y=1$,[/list]we have $x$ and $y$ painted different colors. How many sanferminera colorings are there?
A magician intends to perform the following trick. She announces a positive integer $n$, along with $2n$ real numbers $x_1 < \dots < x_{2n}$, to the audience. A member of the audience then secretly chooses a polynomial $P(x)$ of degree $n$ with real coefficients, computes the $2n$ values $P(x_1), \dots , P(x_{2n})$, and writes down these $2n$ values on the blackboard in non-decreasing order. After that the magician announces the secret polynomial to the audience. Can the magician find a strategy to perform such a trick?
On a table there are 2004 boxes, and in each box a ball lies. I know that some the balls are white and that the number of white balls is even. In each case I may point to two arbitrary boxes and ask whether in the box contains at least a white ball lies. After which minimum number of questions I can indicate two boxes for sure, in which white balls lie?
A set $A$ of integers is called [i]sum-full[/i] if $A \subseteq A + A$, i.e. each element $a \in A$ is the sum of some pair of (not necessarily different) elements $b,c \in A$. A set $A$ of integers is said to be [i]zero-sum-free[/i] if $0$ is the only integer that cannot be expressed as the sum of the elements of a finite nonempty subset of $A$.
Does there exist a sum-full zero-sum-free set of integers?
[i]Romania (Dan Schwarz)[/i]
Prove there exists a constant $c$ (independent of $n$) such that for any graph $G$ with $n>2$ vertices, we can split $G$ into a forest and at most $cf(n)$ disjoint cycles, where
a) $f(n)=n\ln{n}$;
b) $f(n)=n$.
[i]David Yang.[/i]
Christian Reiher and Reid Barton want to open a security box, they already managed to discover the algorithm to generate the key codes and they obtained the following information:
$i)$ In the screen of the box will appear a sequence of $n+1$ numbers, $C_0 = (a_{0,1},a_{0,2},...,a_{0,n+1})$
$ii)$ If the code $K = (k_1,k_2,...,k_n)$ opens the security box then the following must happen:
a) A sequence $C_i = (a_{i,1},a_{i,2},...,a_{i,n+1})$ will be asigned to each $k_i$ defined as follows:
$a_{i,1} = 1$ and $a_{i,j} = a_{i-1,j}-k_ia_{i,j-1}$, for $i,j \ge 1$
b) The sequence $(C_n)$ asigned to $k_n$ satisfies that $S_n = \sum_{i=1}^{n+1}|a_i|$ has its least possible value, considering all possible sequences $K$.
The sequence $C_0$ that appears in the screen is the following:
$a_{0,1} = 1$ and $a_0,i$ is the sum of the products of the elements of each of the subsets with $i-1$ elements of the set $A =$ {$1,2,3,...,n$}, $i\ge 2$, such that $a_{0, n+1} = n!$
Find a sequence $K = (k_1,k_2,...,k_n)$ that satisfies the conditions of the problem and show that there exists at least $n!$ of them.
300 students participate on the international math olympiad. Every student speaks in exactly two of the official languages of the olympiad and every language is spoken by 100 people (it is known that students speak only the official languages). Prove that the students can be sited on a circular table, such that no two neighbors spoke the same language.
Archimedes planned to count all of the prime numbers between $2$ and $1000$ using the Sieve of Eratosthenes as follows:
(a) List the integers from $2$ to $1000$.
(b) Circle the smallest number in the list and call this $p$.
(c) Cross out all multiples of $p$ in the list except for $p$ itself.
(d) Let $p$ be the smallest number remaining that is neither circled nor crossed out. Circle $p$.
(e) Repeat steps $(c)$ and $(d)$ until each number is either circled or crossed out.
At the end of this process, the circled numbers are prime and the crossed out numbers are composite.
Unfortunately, while crossing out the multiples of $2$, Archimedes accidentally crossed out two odd primes in addition to crossing out all the even numbers (besides $2$). Otherwise, he executed the algorithm correctly. If the number of circled numbers remaining when Archimedes finished equals the number of primes from $2$ to $1000$ (including $2$), then what is the largest possible prime that Archimedes accidentally crossed out?
Let $n \geq 2$ be a positive integer. A total of $2n$ balls are coloured with $n$ colours so that there are two balls of each colour. These balls are put inside $n$ cylindrical boxes with two balls in each box, one on top of the other. Phoe Wa Lone has an empty cylindrical box and his goal is to sort the balls so that balls of the same colour are grouped together in each box. In a [i]move[/i], Phoe Wa Lone can do one of the following:
[list]
[*]Select a box containing exactly two balls and reverse the order of the top and the bottom balls.
[*]Take a ball $b$ at the top of a non-empty box and either put it in an empty box, or put it in the box only containing the ball of the same colour as $b$.
[/list]
Find the smallest positive integer $N$ such that for any initial placement of the balls, Phoe Wa Lone can always achieve his goal using at most $N$ moves in total.
In a $2\times n$ array we have positive reals s.t. the sum of the numbers in each of the $n$ columns is $1$. Show that we can select a number in each column s.t. the sum of the selected numbers in each row is at most $\frac{n+1}4$.
For two positive integers a and b, which are relatively prime, find all integer that can be the great common divisor of $a+b$ and $\frac{a^{2005}+b^{2005}}{a+b}$.
There are $2^n$ words of length $n$ over the alphabet $\{0, 1\}$. Prove that the following algorithm generates the sequence $w_0, w_1, \ldots, w_{2^n-1}$ of all these words such that any two consecutive words differ in exactly one digit.
(1) $w_0 = 00 \ldots 0$ ($n$ zeros).
(2) Suppose $w_{m-1} = a_1a_2 \ldots a_n,\quad a_i \in \{0, 1\}$. Let $e(m)$ be the exponent of $2$ in the representation of $n$ as a product of primes, and let $j = 1 + e(m)$. Replace the digit $a_j$ in the word $w_{m-1}$ by $1 - a_j$. The obtained word is $w_m$.
Let $n > 1$ be an integer. In a circular arrangement of $n$ lamps $L_0, \ldots, L_{n-1},$ each of of which can either ON or OFF, we start with the situation where all lamps are ON, and then carry out a sequence of steps, $Step_0, Step_1, \ldots .$ If $L_{j-1}$ ($j$ is taken mod $n$) is ON then $Step_j$ changes the state of $L_j$ (it goes from ON to OFF or from OFF to ON) but does not change the state of any of the other lamps. If $L_{j-1}$ is OFF then $Step_j$ does not change anything at all. Show that:
(i) There is a positive integer $M(n)$ such that after $M(n)$ steps all lamps are ON again,
(ii) If $n$ has the form $2^k$ then all the lamps are ON after $n^2-1$ steps,
(iii) If $n$ has the form $2^k + 1$ then all lamps are ON after $n^2 - n + 1$ steps.
Suppose $a_1, \dots, a_n$ are integers whose greatest common divisor is 1. Let $S$ be a set of integers with the following properties:
(a) For $i=1, \dots, n$, $a_i \in S$.
(b) For $i,j = 1, \dots, n$ (not necessarily distinct), $a_i - a_j \in S$.
(c) For any integers $x,y \in S$, if $x+y \in S$, then $x-y \in S$.
Prove that $S$ must be equal to the set of all integers.
A finite set $S$ of unit squares is chosen out of a large grid of unit squares. The squares of $S$ are tiled with isosceles right triangles of hypotenuse $2$ so that the triangles do not overlap each other, do not extend past $S$, and all of $S$ is fully covered by the triangles. Additionally, the hypotenuse of each triangle lies along a grid line, and the vertices of the triangles lie at the corners of the squares. Show that the number of triangles must be a multiple of $4$.
Let $n$ be an positive integer. Find the smallest integer $k$ with the following property; Given any real numbers $a_1 , \cdots , a_d $ such that $a_1 + a_2 + \cdots + a_d = n$ and $0 \le a_i \le 1$ for $i=1,2,\cdots ,d$, it is possible to partition these numbers into $k$ groups (some of which may be empty) such that the sum of the numbers in each group is at most $1$.
Let $n \geq 3$ be a fixed integer. The number $1$ is written $n$ times on a blackboard. Below the blackboard, there are two buckets that are initially empty. A move consists of erasing two of the numbers $a$ and $b$, replacing them with the numbers $1$ and $a+b$, then adding one stone to the first bucket and $\gcd(a, b)$ stones to the second bucket. After some finite number of moves, there are $s$ stones in the first bucket and $t$ stones in the second bucket, where $s$ and $t$ are positive integers. Find all possible values of the ratio $\frac{t}{s}$.
Suppose the sequence of nonnegative integers $a_1, a_2, \ldots, a_{1997}$ satisfies
\[ a_i + a_j \leq a_{i+j} \leq a_i + a_j + 1 \]
for all $i,j \geq 1$ with $i + j \leq 1997$. Show that there exists a real number $x$ such that $a_n = \lfloor nx \rfloor$ (the greatest integer $\leq nx$) for all $1 \leq n \leq 1997$.
A board of $2n$ x $2n$ is colored chess style, a movement is the changing of colors of a $2$ x $2$ square. For what integers $n$ is possible to complete the board with one color using a finite number of movements?
Suppose that $S\subseteq \mathbb Z$ has the following property: if $a,b\in S$, then $a+b\in S$. Further, we know that $S$ has at least one negative element and one positive element. Is the following statement true?
There exists an integer $d$ such that for every $x\in \mathbb Z$, $x\in S$ if and only if $d|x$.
[i]proposed by Mahyar Sefidgaran[/i]
Students in a class form groups each of which contains exactly three members such that any two distinct groups have at most one member in common. Prove that, when the class size is $ 46$, there is a set of $ 10$ students in which no group is properly contained.
Let $\leftarrow$ denote the left arrow key on a standard keyboard. If one opens a text editor and types the keys "ab$\leftarrow$ cd $\leftarrow \leftarrow$ e $\leftarrow \leftarrow$ f", the result is "faecdb". We say that a string $B$ is [i]reachable[/i] from a string $A$ if it is possible to insert some amount of $\leftarrow$'s in $A$, such that typing the resulting characters produces $B$. So, our example shows that "faecdb" is reachable from "abcdef".
Prove that for any two strings $A$ and $B$, $A$ is reachable from $B$ if and only if $B$ is reachable from $A$.
There are $ 16$ pupils in a class. Every month, the teacher divides the pupils into two groups. Find the smallest number of months after which it will be possible that every two pupils were in two different groups during at least one month.
To each vertex of a regular pentagon an integer is assigned, so that the sum of all five numbers is positive. If three consecutive vertices are assigned the numbers $x,y,z$ respectively, and $y<0$, then the following operation is allowed: $x,y,z$ are replaced by $x+y,-y,z+y$ respectively. Such an operation is performed repeatedly as long as at least one of the five numbers is negative. Determine whether this procedure necessarily comes to an end after a finite number of steps.
[i]A. Akopyan, A. Akopyan, A. Akopyan, I. Bogdanov[/i]
A conjurer Arutyun and his assistant Amayak are going to show following super-trick. A circle is drawn on the board in the room. Spectators mark $2007$ points on this circle, after that Amayak
removes one of them. Then Arutyun comes to the room and shows a semicircle, to which the removed point belonged. Explain, how Arutyun and Amayak may show this super-trick.