The Magician and his Assistant show trick. The Viewer writes on the board the sequence of $N$ digits. Then the Assistant covers some pair of adjacent digits so that they become invisible. Finally, the Magician enters the show, looks at the board and guesses the covered digits and their order. Find the minimal $N$ such that the Magician and his Assistant can agree in advance so that the Magician always guesses right

Four coins are laid out on a table so that they form the corners of a square. One move consists of tipping one of the coins by letting it jump over one of the others the coin so that it ends up on the directly opposite side of the other coin, the same distance from as it was before the move was made. Is it possible to make a number of moves so that the coins ends up in the corners of a square with a different side length than the original square?

There is a box with 2020 stones. Ana and Beto alternately play removing stones from the box and starting with Ana. Each player in turn must remove a positive number of stones that is capicua. Whoever leaves the box empty wins. Determine which of the two has a strategy winner and explain what that strategy is. $Note: $ A positive integer is capicua if it can be read equally from right to right. left and left to right. For example, 3, 22, 484 and 2002 are capicuas.

In a game of [i]Chomp[/i], two players alternately take bites from a 5-by-7 grid of unit squares. To take a bite, a player chooses one of the remaining squares, then removes ("eats'') all squares in the quadrant defined by the left edge (extended upward) and the lower edge (extended rightward) of the chosen square. For example, the bite determined by the shaded square in the diagram would remove the shaded square and the four squares marked by $\times.$ (The squares with two or more dotted edges have been removed form the original board in previous moves.) [asy] defaultpen(linewidth(0.7)); fill((2,2)--(2,3)--(3,3)--(3,2)--cycle, mediumgray); int[] array={5, 5, 5, 4, 2, 2, 2, 0}; pair[] ex = {(2,3), (2,4), (3,2), (3,3)}; draw((3,5)--(7,5)^^(4,4)--(7,4)^^(4,3)--(7,3), linetype("3 3")); draw((4,4)--(4,5)^^(5,2)--(5,5)^^(6,2)--(6,5)^^(7,2)--(7,5), linetype("3 3")); int i, j; for(i=0; i<7; i=i+1) { for(j=0; j<array[i]; j=j+1) { draw((i,j+1)--(i,j)--(i+1,j)); } draw((i,array[i])--(i+1,array[i])); if(array[i]>array[i+1]) { draw((i+1,array[i])--(i+1,array[i+1])); }} for(i=0; i<4; i=i+1) { draw(ex[i]--(ex[i].x+1, ex[i].y+1), linewidth(1.2)); draw((ex[i].x+1, ex[i].y)--(ex[i].x, ex[i].y+1), linewidth(1.2)); }[/asy] The object of the game is to make one's opponent take the last bite. The diagram shows one of the many subsets of the set of 35 unit squares that can occur during the game of Chomp. How many different subsets are there in all? Include the full board and empty board in your count.

Let $N$ be an integer, $N>2$. Arnold and Bernold play the following game: there are initially $N$ tokens on a pile. Arnold plays first and removes $k$ tokens from the pile, $1\le k < N$. Then Bernold removes $m$ tokens from the pile, $1\le m\le 2k$ and so on, that is, each player, on its turn, removes a number of tokens from the pile that is between $1$ and twice the number of tokens his opponent took last. The player that removes the last token wins. For each value of $N$, find which player has a winning strategy and describe it.

Jacob and Laban take turns playing a game. Each of them starts with the list of square numbers $1, 4, 9, \dots, 2021^2$, and there is a whiteboard in front of them with the number $0$ on it. Jacob chooses a number $x^2$ from his list, removes it from his list, and replaces the number $W$ on the whiteboard with $W + x^2$. Laban then does the same with a number from his list, and the repeat back and forth until both of them have no more numbers in their list. Now every time that the number on the whiteboard is divisible by $4$ after a player has taken his turn, Jacob gets a sheep. Jacob wants to have as many sheep as possible. What is the greatest number $K$ such that Jacob can guarantee to get at least $K$ sheep by the end of the game, no matter how Laban plays?

A [i]site[/i] is any point $(x, y)$ in the plane such that $x$ and $y$ are both positive integers less than or equal to 20. Initially, each of the 400 sites is unoccupied. Amy and Ben take turns placing stones with Amy going first. On her turn, Amy places a new red stone on an unoccupied site such that the distance between any two sites occupied by red stones is not equal to $\sqrt{5}$. On his turn, Ben places a new blue stone on any unoccupied site. (A site occupied by a blue stone is allowed to be at any distance from any other occupied site.) They stop as soon as a player cannot place a stone. Find the greatest $K$ such that Amy can ensure that she places at least $K$ red stones, no matter how Ben places his blue stones. [i]Proposed by Gurgen Asatryan, Armenia[/i]

Players $A$ and $B$ play a "paintful" game on the real line. Player $A$ has a pot of paint with four units of black ink. A quantity $p$ of this ink suffices to blacken a (closed) real interval of length $p$. In every round, player $A$ picks some positive integer $m$ and provides $1/2^m $ units of ink from the pot. Player $B$ then picks an integer $k$ and blackens the interval from $k/2^m$ to $(k+1)/2^m$ (some parts of this interval may have been blackened before). The goal of player $A$ is to reach a situation where the pot is empty and the interval $[0,1]$ is not completely blackened. Decide whether there exists a strategy for player $A$ to win in a finite number of moves.

Vaggelis has a box that contains $2015$ white and $2015$ black balls. In every step, he follows the procedure below: He choses randomly two balls from the box. If they are both blacks, he paints one white and he keeps it in the box, and throw the other one out of the box. If they are both white, he keeps one in the box and throws the other out. If they are one white and one black, he throws the white out, and keeps the black in the box. He continues this procedure, until three balls remain in the box. He then looks inside and he sees that there are balls of both colors. How many white balls does he see then, and how many black?

In the game of [i]Ring Mafia[/i], there are $2019$ counters arranged in a circle. $673$ of these counters are mafia, and the remaining $1346$ counters are town. Two players, Tony and Madeline, take turns with Tony going first. Tony does not know which counters are mafia but Madeline does. On Tony’s turn, he selects any subset of the counters (possibly the empty set) and removes all counters in that set. On Madeline’s turn, she selects a town counter which is adjacent to a mafia counter and removes it. Whenever counters are removed, the remaining counters are brought closer together without changing their order so that they still form a circle. The game ends when either all mafia counters have been removed, or all town counters have been removed. Is there a strategy for Tony that guarantees, no matter where the mafia counters are placed and what Madeline does, that at least one town counter remains at the end of the game? [i]Proposed by Andrew Gu[/i]

A positive integer $a$ is selected, and some positive integers are written on a board. Alice and Bob play the following game. On Alice's turn, she must replace some integer $n$ on the board with $n+a$, and on Bob's turn he must replace some even integer $n$ on the board with $n/2$. Alice goes first and they alternate turns. If on his turn Bob has no valid moves, the game ends. After analyzing the integers on the board, Bob realizes that, regardless of what moves Alice makes, he will be able to force the game to end eventually. Show that, in fact, for this value of $a$ and these integers on the board, the game is guaranteed to end regardless of Alice's or Bob's moves.

There is the number $1$ on the board at the beginning. If the number $a$ is written on the board, then we can also write a natural number $b$ such that $a + b + 1$ is a divisor of $a^2 + b^2 + 1$. Can any positive integer appear on the board after a certain time? Justify your answer.

Arnaldo and Bernardo play a Super Naval Battle. Each has a board $n \times n$. Arnaldo puts boats on his board (at least one but not known how many). Each boat occupies the $n$ houses of a line or a column and the boats they can not overlap or have a common side. Bernardo marks $m$ houses (representing shots) on your board. After Bernardo marked the houses, Arnaldo says which of them correspond to positions occupied by ships. Bernardo wins, and then discovers the positions of all Arnaldo's boats. Determine the lowest value of $m$ for which Bernardo can guarantee his victory.

For $n$ an odd positive integer, the unit squares of an $n\times n$ chessboard are coloured alternately black and white, with the four corners coloured black. A it tromino is an $L$-shape formed by three connected unit squares. For which values of $n$ is it possible to cover all the black squares with non-overlapping trominos? When it is possible, what is the minimum number of trominos needed?

Sheldon and Bella play a game on an infinite grid of cells. On each of his turns, Sheldon puts one of the following tetrominoes (reflections and rotations aren't permitted) [asy] size(200); draw((0, 0)--(1, 0)--(1, 2)--(0, 2)--cycle); draw((1, 1)--(2, 1)--(2, 3)--(1, 3)--cycle); draw((0,1)--(1,1)); draw((1,2)--(2,2)); draw((5, 0.5)--(6, 0.5)--(6, 1.5)--(5, 1.5)--cycle); draw((6, 0.5)--(7, 0.5)--(7, 1.5)--(6, 1.5)--cycle); draw((6, 1.5)--(7, 1.5)--(7, 2.5)--(6, 2.5)--cycle); draw((7, 1.5)--(8, 1.5)--(8, 2.5)--(7, 2.5)--cycle); [/asy] somewhere on the grid without overlap. Then, Bella colors that tetromino such that it has a different color from any other tetromino that shares a side with it. After $2631$ such moves by each player, the game ends, and Sheldon's score is the number of colors used by Bella. What's the maximum $N$ such that Sheldon can guarantee that his score will be at least $N$?