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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.8 National olympiad Prove it Brazil

The venusian prophet Zabruberson sent to his pupils a 10000-letter word, each letter being AA or EE: the Zabrubic word. Their pupils decided that, for 1k100001 \le k \le 10000, each word comprised of kk consecutive letters of the Zabrubic word is a prophetic word of length kk. It is known that there are at most 7 prophetic words of length 3. Find the maximum number of prophetic words of length 10.

Solution

Let f(n)f(n) be the maximum number of prophetic words of length nn. Obviously, f(1)=2f(1) = 2, f(2)=4f(2) = 4 and f(3)=7f(3) = 7. Moreover, since there are exactly 23=82^3 = 8 3-letter words, each letter being AA or EE, there is a forbidden substring WW of length three. So we can estimate f(n)f(n) from above: in fact, each of the nn-letter words belongs to exactly one of three sets: the set of words whose last letter is different from the last letter of WW; the set of words whose penultimate letter is different from the second letter of WW and whose last letter is equal to the last letter of WW; the set of words whose third-to-last letter is different from the first letter of WW and whose two last letters are equal to the two last letters of WW. There are exactly f(n1)f(n-1), f(n2)f(n-2) and f(n3)f(n-3) words in these sets, respectively (notice the last letter, two last letters and three last letters of the words in the respective sets are determined and that they don't impose any restriction on the other letters). So f(n)f(n1)+f(n2)+f(n3)f(n) \le f(n-1)+f(n-2)+f(n-3). If W=AAAW = AAA it's not hard to prove that f(n)f(n) is actually equal to f(n1)+f(n2)+f(n3)f(n-1) + f(n-2)+f(n-3). Just construct the words without a substring AAAAAA using all words that fit the description above. Substituting, we get f(10)=504f(10) = 504 and now it remains to prove that there is a Zabrubic word satisfying the conditions of the problem, but this isn't hard, too: first, concatenate all 504 10-letter prophetic words, separate them with an EE and complete the word with 100005041110000 - 504 \cdot 11 EE's.
So the maximum number of 10-letter prophetic words is 504.

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