Olympiad Maths Prep

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Algebra Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Prove it Ukraine

Is it possible to write five integers on a board so that for any two numbers, there exists a pair of numbers among the remaining three whose sum is equal to the sum of the original two numbers?

Solution

It's enough to choose the following numbers: 2-2, 1-1, 00, 11, 22. Then we can write down the sets of integers, but we can also apply the following reasoning: for any two numbers, say, aa, bb, selected by Petrik, from one side exists pair of numbers (a,b)(-a, -b), whose sum is the opposite to the initial, and, from another side, there exists a triple of numbers except aa, bb, and their sum also is (ab)(-a - b), as the sum of all five numbers is zero. So we get a correspondence between the numbers from the left and from the right parts of the board.

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