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Local Mathematical Competitions

Combinatorics Difficulty 4.5 AIME Prove it Romania

Of the vertices of a cube, 7 of them have assigned the value 00, and the eighth the value 11. A move is selecting an edge and increasing the numbers at its ends by an integer value k>0k > 0. Prove that after any finite number of moves, the g.c.d. of the 88 numbers at vertices is equal to 11.

Solution

Let us alternately colour the vertices in black and white. After any move, the difference between the sums of the numbers at the black and the white vertices remains 11, therefore the g.c.d. of the 88 numbers is equal to 11 (as it is dividing the difference of the sums mentioned above).

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