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Saudi Arabian Mathematical Competitions, 2015

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.8 AIME, harder Prove it Saudi Arabia

Find the number of strictly increasing sequences of nonnegative integers with the first term 00 and the last term 1515, and among any two consecutive terms, exactly one of them is even.

Solution

Let AnA_{n} be the set of such sequences with the last term is nn instead of 1515, and an=∣An∣a_{n}=|A_{n}|. We will show that (an)(a_{n}) is in fact the Fibonacci sequence and deduce that a15=610a_{15}=610.

We can check easily that a1=a2=1a_{1}=a_{2}=1. For n≥1n \geq 1, we consider the second-last term of each sequence in An+2A_{n+2}. We have two cases.

Case 1. The second-last term is n+1n+1. Then we can leave out the last term to get an element of An+1A_{n+1}. Conversely, for each element of An+1A_{n+1}, we can add n+2n+2 to the end to have an element of An+2A_{n+2}. Hence, in this case, we have an+1a_{n+1} sequences.

Case 2. The second-last term is at most nn. But nn and n+2n+2 have the same parity, so the second-last term is at most n−1n-1. When we substitute the last term n+2n+2 with nn, we have an element of AnA_{n}. Conversely, if we replace nn in an element of AnA_{n} by n+2n+2, we have an element of An+2A_{n+2}. Hence, in this case, we have ana_{n} sequences.

This proves that an+2=an+1+ana_{n+2}=a_{n+1}+a_{n}, and therefore (an)(a_{n}) is the Fibonacci sequence.

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