Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /325 of 397

Combinatorics Difficulty 6.8 National Olympiad Prove it Taiwan

Alice and Bob play a game. Starting from Alice, two guys take turns to choose a digit from 11 to 99 without repetition, and put them from the leftmost to the rightmost to form a 77-digit integer (i.e., A1B2A3B4A5B6A7\overline{A_1B_2A_3B_4A_5B_6A_7}). If there exists a perfect 77th-power that ends in these 77 digits, then Alice wins; otherwise, Bob wins. Who has the winning strategy?

Solution

Alice has a winning strategy. By the following lemma, as long as Alice makes A7{1,3,7,9}A_7 \in \{1,3,7,9\}, Alice will necessarily win; and since Bob can block at most three of these, Alice must win.

Lemma
If 0<a<1070 < a < 10^7 and gcd(a,10)=1\text{gcd}(a, 10) = 1, then x7a(mod107)x^7 \equiv a \pmod{10^7} has a solution.

Proof
We first prove:

Claim. If gcd(m,10)=gcd(n,10)=1\text{gcd}(m, 10) = \text{gcd}(n, 10) = 1 and 107m7n710^7|m^7 - n^7, then 107mn10^7|m - n.

Pf of Claim. Note that
m7n7=(mn)(m6+m5n+m4n2+m3n3+m2n4+mn5+n6). m^7 - n^7 = (m-n)(m^6 + m^5n + m^4n^2 + m^3n^3 + m^2n^4 + mn^5 + n^6).
Therefore gcd(mn,m7n7mn)=gcd(mn,7n6)\text{gcd}(m-n, \frac{m^7-n^7}{m-n}) = \text{gcd}(m-n, 7n^6). Also note that 7n67n^6 is not a multiple of 22 or 55, so 27mn2^7|m-n or 27(m7n7)/(mn)2^7|(m^7-n^7)/(m-n), and 57mn5^7|m-n or 57(m7n7)/(mn)5^7|(m^7-n^7)/(m-n). We now prove that both "or" statements must hold in the former way.

1. Since mm and nn must both be odd, and the two factors cannot have a common factor, it follows that 27mn2^7|m-n.
2. Note that if m1,2,3,4(mod5)m \equiv 1,2,3,4 \pmod 5, then m71,3,2,4(mod5)m^7 \equiv 1,3,2,4 \pmod 5. Substituting this in, it is easy to see that 57m7n75^7|m^7-n^7; and 27mn57mn2^7|m-n \Rightarrow 5^7|m-n.

Combining the above, the Claim is proved.

Returning to the original problem, by the Claim, the reduced residue system modulo 10710^7, after being raised to the seventh power, remains a reduced residue system, hence x7a(mod 107)x^7 \equiv a(\text{mod } 10^7) always has a solution.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from zh; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.