Maths Olympiad Prep

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, 2017

Combinatorics Difficulty 6.0 National Olympiad Find the answer United Kingdom

Naomi and Tom play a game, with Naomi going first. They take it in turns to pick an integer from 1 to 100, each time selecting an integer which no-one has chosen before. A player loses the game if, after their turn, the sum of all the integers chosen since the start of the game (by both of them) cannot be written as the difference of two square numbers. Determine if one of the players has a winning strategy, and if so, which.

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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.