The eyes of a magician are blindfolded while a person $A$ from the audience arranges $n$ identical coins in a row, some are heads and the others are tails. The assistant of the magician asks $A$ to write an integer between $1$ and $n$ inclusive and to show it to the audience. Having seen the number, the assistant chooses a coin and turns it to the other side (so if it was heads it becomes tails and vice versa) and does not touch anything else. Afterwards, the bandages are removed from the magician, he sees the sequence and guesses the written number by $A$. For which $n$ is this possible? [hide=Spoiler hint] The original formulation asks: a) Show that if $n$ is possible, so is $2n$; b) Show that only powers of $2$ are possible; I have omitted this from the above formulation, for the reader's interest. [/hide]

A magician and his assistent are performing the following trick.There is a row of 12 empty closed boxes. The magician leaves the room, and a person from the audience hides a coin in each of two boxes of his choice, so that the assistent knows which boxes contain coins. The magician returns, and the assistant is allowed to open one box that does not contain a coin. Next, the magician selects 4 boxes, which are simultaneously opened. The goal of the magician is to open both boxes that contain coins. Devise a method that will allow the magician and his assistant to always succesfully perform the trick.

Let $n \ge 2$ be a positive integer. For every number from $1$ to $n$, there is a card with this number and which is either black or white. A magician can repeatedly perform the following move: For any two tiles with different number and different colour, he can replace the card with the smaller number by one identical to the other card. For instance, when $n=5$ and the initial configuration is $(1B, 2B, 3W, 4B,5B)$, the magician can choose $1B, 3W$ on the first move to obtain $(3W, 2B, 3W, 4B, 5B)$ and then $3W, 4B$ on the second move to obtain $(4B, 2B, 3W, 4B, 5B)$. Determine in terms of $n$ all possible lengths of sequences of moves from any possible initial configuration to any configuration in which no more move is possible.

Two magicians are about to show the next trick. A circle is drawn on the board with one semicircle marked. Viewers mark 100 points on this circle, then the first magician erases one of them. After this, the second one for the first time looks at the drawing and determines from the remaining 99 points whether the erased point was lying on the marked semicircle. Prove that such a trick will not always succeed.

A magician and his assistant perform in front of an audience of many people. On the stage there is an $8$×$8$ board, the magician blindfolds himself, and then the assistant goes inviting people from the public to write down the numbers $1, 2, 3, 4, . . . , 64$ in the boxes they want (one number per box) until completing the $64$ numbers. After the assistant covers two adyacent boxes, at her choice. Finally, the magician removes his blindfold and has to $“guess”$ what number is in each square that the assistant. Explain how they put together this trick. $Clarification:$ Two squares are adjacent if they have a common side