Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.2 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

A positive integer is written in each cell of an 8×88 \times 8 table so that each entry is the arithmetic mean of some two of its neighbors. Find the maximum number of distinct integers that may appear in the table.

Solution

Solution:

First consider the minimum number mm in the table. If it appears in some cell AA, two neighboring cells B,CB, C must also contain mm because there is no other way for mm to be the arithmetic mean of two numbers in the table. Since BB cannot neighbor CC, it must have another neighbor DD in addition to AA that contains mm.

So the minimum number in the table appears at least four times. Likewise, the maximum number appears at least four times. We can now find 8 cells that contain at most 2 distinct numbers. The remaining 56 cells of course contain at most 56 distinct numbers. So there are at most 58 distinct numbers in the table. The diagram below shows that this bound can be achieved.

11212237385858
11202336395858
32192435405756
45182534415455
76172633425352
89162732435051
1110152831444948
1213142930454647

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