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Geometry Difficulty 8.3 Shortlist Prove it Germany

Let the vertices of a regular 100-gon PP be colored either red or blue, such that each color occurs at least 24 times.
Prove that there exist 24 pairwise disjoint quadrilaterals Q1,Q2,,Q24Q_{1}, Q_{2}, \ldots, Q_{24}, whose vertices are also vertices of PP, such that each quadrilateral QiQ_{i} has either one or three red vertices.

Solution

We prove the following statement by induction on nn:
If the vertices of a convex 4n4 n-gon PP are colored red and blue such that each color occurs at least (n1)(n-1) times, then we can find (n1)(n-1) pairwise disjoint quadrilaterals Q1,,Qn1Q_{1}, \ldots, Q_{n-1}, whose vertices are also vertices of PP.
For n=25n=25 we obtain the claim of the problem statement.

For n=1n=1 there is nothing to show. Now let n2n \geqslant 2 and, without loss of generality, suppose there are at least 2n2 n red vertices. The case in which the vertices are colored alternately or 2-alternately is treated below. Otherwise, there must be four consecutive vertices among which there are not exactly two red and two blue. Then there also exist four consecutive vertices among which there are more red than blue, since otherwise there would be fewer red than blue vertices. Choose such four vertices: If exactly three of them are red, we choose the quadrilateral spanned by the four selected vertices as Qn1Q_{n-1}. The remaining 4(n1)4(n-1) points form a convex 4(n1)4(n-1)-gon PP^{\prime}, which is disjoint from Qn1Q_{n-1} and to which we can apply the induction hypothesis. If, on the other hand, all four of the selected vertices are red, we proceed along the boundary of the 4n4 n-gon until we hit for the first time one of the at least n1>0n-1>0 blue points, and apply the same argument as in the previous case.

There remain the cases in which the vertices are colored alternately or 2-alternately. For these there are various constructions. We first consider the alternating case and denote the vertices of PP by P1,P2,,P4nP_{1}, P_{2}, \ldots, P_{4 n}, where, without loss of generality, P1P_{1} is blue. In this case there are (at least) two constructions (see the following sketches).

Figure 1

Variant 1
Figure 2

Variant 2

In Variant 1 we begin with the quadrilateral P2P3P4P4nP_{2} P_{3} P_{4} P_{4 n} and then continue from P4P_{4} counterclockwise in steps of three and from P4nP_{4 n} clockwise in steps of one. In doing so, exactly ...

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