Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.0 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

On an infinite chessboard, two squares are said to touch if they share at least one vertex and they are not the same square. Suppose that the squares are colored black and white such that
- there is at least one square of each color;
- each black square touches exactly mm black squares;
- each white square touches exactly nn white squares
where mm and nn are integers. Must mm and nn be equal?

Solution

Solution:

The answer is no. There are many tilings to demonstrate this; one of the simplest is to divide the board into horizontal stripes and color every third stripe black. In this tiling, m=2m=2 and n=5n=5.

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