Maths Olympiad Prep

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Algebra Difficulty 4.3 AIME Find the answer United States

Problem:

While Travis is having fun on cubes, Sherry is hopping in the same manner on an octahedron. An octahedron has six vertices and eight regular triangular faces. After five minutes, how likely is Sherry to be one edge away from where she started?

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Solution

Solution:

Answer: 1116\frac{11}{16}

Let the starting vertex be the 'bottom' one. Then there is a 'top' vertex, and 4 'middle' ones. If p(n)p(n) is the probability that Sherry is on a middle vertex after nn minutes, p(0)=0p(0)=0,
p(n+1)=(1p(n))+p(n)12p(n+1) = (1 - p(n)) + p(n) \cdot \frac{1}{2}.

This recurrence gives us the following equations.
p(n+1)=1p(n)2p(0)=0p(1)=1p(2)=12p(3)=34p(4)=58p(5)=1116 \begin{aligned} p(n+1) & = 1 - \frac{p(n)}{2} \\ p(0) & = 0 \\ p(1) & = 1 \\ p(2) & = \frac{1}{2} \\ p(3) & = \frac{3}{4} \\ p(4) & = \frac{5}{8} \\ p(5) & = \frac{11}{16} \end{aligned}

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.