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Combinatorics Difficulty 7.9 National olympiad, round 2 Prove it China

Let AA be a subset of the set S={1,2,,1000000}S = \{1, 2, \dots, 1000000\} containing exactly 101101 elements. Prove that there exist numbers t1,t2,,t100t_1, t_2, \dots, t_{100} in SS such that the sets
Aj={x+tjxA} for j=1,2,,100 A_j = \{x + t_j \mid x \in A\} \text{ for } j = 1, 2, \dots, 100
are pairwise disjoint.

Solution

Consider the set D={xyx,yA}D = \{x-y \mid x, y \in A\}. There are at most 101×100+1=10101101 \times 100 + 1 = 10101 elements in DD. Two sets AiA_i and AjA_j have nonempty intersection if and only if titjt_i - t_j is in DD. So we need to choose the 100100 elements in such a way that the difference for any two elements is not in DD.

Now select these elements by induction. Choose one element arbitrarily from SS. Assume that kk elements, k99k \le 99, are already chosen. An element xx in SS that is already chosen prevents us from selecting any element from the set x+Dx+D, where x+D={x+yyD}x+D = \{x+y \mid y \in D\}. Thus after kk elements are chosen, at most 10101k10101k elements are forbidden. Since SS has 10000001000000 elements, and 10101×99=10000009910101 \times 99 = 1000000 - 99, there is always at least one element left to choose for the next tk+1t_{k+1}. Therefore, we can choose 100100 such elements t1,t2,,t100t_1, t_2, \dots, t_{100} so that the sets AjA_j are pairwise disjoint.

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