Problem:
The numbers are written on a blackboard (where ). A move is to replace two numbers by their sum and non-negative difference. A series of moves makes all the numbers equal . Find all possible .
Problem:
The numbers are written on a blackboard (where ). A move is to replace two numbers by their sum and non-negative difference. A series of moves makes all the numbers equal . Find all possible .
Solution:
If a prime divides and , then it divides and , so if is odd, it divides and . Thus if an odd prime divides , then it must divide all the original numbers including . So must be a power of . Note that and . So (by a trivial induction) if we get all the numbers equal to , then we can get them all to equal . Finally, note that we can never decrease the largest number on the board, so the answer must be all powers of greater than some minimum, which must be at least .
We use induction to show that if is the smallest power of which is , then we can get all numbers equal to . Note that , so with a zero we can double each member of any set of numbers as often as we wish and finally convert the zero. For example, we could convert to . It is convenient to take the induction hypothesis as : we can convert to , where is the smallest power of which is .
We show first that is true for . For , we take , then . For , we ignore the and use the case . For , we take . Then . Then we use the to convert the remaining powers of () to . For , we take and , then . Finally, we use the to convert and to . For , we take , then , then , then , then and finally use the to convert the remaining to .
Let , where and assume is true for all . If , we convert the pair , to . We have , so by induction we can convert to . Now all the numbers except are powers of and we can use the to convert them each to . Similarly, if , we convert , to and , to and then proceed as in the previous case. If , then we start by converting the pairs , , , , . That gives some s and . Now by we can convert to . The remaining numbers can either be converted to powers of by (if ) or are already powers of . Finally we use the to bring all powers of up to . In the case , we ignore and use the case to convert the others.