Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /50 of 60

, 2020

Combinatorics Difficulty 7.0 National Olympiad, round 2 Find the answer United Kingdom

Six children are evenly spaced around a circular table. Initially, one has a pile of n>0n > 0 sweets in front of them, and the others have nothing. If a child has at least four sweets in front of them, they may perform the following move: eat one sweet and give one sweet to each of their immediate neighbours and to the child directly opposite them. An arrangement is called perfect if there is a sequence of moves which results in each child having the same number of sweets in front of them. For which values of nn is the initial arrangement perfect?

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

Source: UK Mathematics Trust, licensed © UK Mathematics Trust; question papers published free at bmos.ukmt.org.uk. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project. Solutions are the publisher's, linked not copied.