Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.8 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

One thousand people are in a tennis tournament where each person plays against each other person exactly once, and there are no ties. Prove that it is possible to put all the competitors in a line so that each of the 998 people who are not at an end of the line either defeated both their neighbors or lost to both their neighbors.

Solution

Solution:

Take the natural graph theoretic interpretation, where an edge points towards the loser of each pair, and call such a line an alternating path. Consider the longest alternating path, and suppose it doesn't contain everyone. We will show we can make the path longer, which would be a contradiction.

First, assume the path has an odd number of vertices, labeled v1,,vnv_{1}, \ldots, v_{n}. WLOG v1v_{1} points towards v2v_{2}, v3v_{3} points towards v2v_{2}, all the way up to vnv_{n} which points towards vn1v_{n-1} (otherwise, reverse all the edges). Also WLOG v1v_{1} points towards vnv_{n} (if not, label the vertices backwards). Let ww be a vertex not in the path. Note that if vnv_{n} points towards ww, we can make the path longer by adding ww to the end. Thus, ww must point towards vnv_{n}. But now we can take the path w,vn,v1,,vn1w, v_{n}, v_{1}, \ldots, v_{n-1}, which is longer than before, and so a contradiction.

Now assume the path has an even number of vertices, labeled v1,,vnv_{1}, \ldots, v_{n}, and WLOG v1v_{1} points towards v2v_{2} again. Then vn1v_{n-1} will point towards vnv_{n}. Since 1000 is even, there are at least 2 vertices not in the path, say w1w_{1} and w2w_{2}. If either one points towards vnv_{n}, we can add it to the end of the path, so vnv_{n} must point towards both. Similarly, they must both point towards v1v_{1}. But now note that if vn1v_{n-1} points to either, we can make the path v1,,vn1,wi,vnv_{1}, \ldots, v_{n-1}, w_{i}, v_{n}, which is longer. Thus, w1,w2w_{1}, w_{2} must both point towards vn1v_{n-1}. Now restrict our attention to v1,,vn1v_{1}, \ldots, v_{n-1}. Note that w1,w2w_{1}, w_{2} both point towards both ends, so we can WLOG assume v1v_{1} points towards vn1v_{n-1}. Also WLOG w1w_{1} points towards w2w_{2}. Then we can form the path w2,w1,vn1,v1,,vn2w_{2}, w_{1}, v_{n-1}, v_{1}, \ldots, v_{n-2}, which has n+1n+1 vertices. Thus, if the longest alternating path does not contain every vertex, we can make it longer, which is a contradiction, so there must exist an alternating path with all 1000 vertices.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.