Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /58 of 60

, 2026

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

There are 1000 lily pads on a pond arranged in a circle and labelled 1,2,,10001, 2, \ldots, 1000 in order. (The first four lily pads may also be described using the labels 1001, 1002, 1003 and 1004, respectively.) The first nn lily pads are each occupied by a frog with the remaining lily pads not occupied.

Each minute, exactly one of the frogs makes a move. Suppose the frog is on lily pad kk. That frog may either:

(i) Swim to lily pad k+4k + 4 or k4k - 4, provided that it is not occupied; or

(ii) Jump to lily pad k+3k + 3 or k3k - 3 provided that this lily pad is not occupied and the two lily pads jumped over are both occupied. When this happens, the two frogs that were jumped over dive into the pond and don't participate in any further moves.

For which values of nn is it possible, by a sequence of moves, to end with exactly one frog remaining on the lily pads?

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.