Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.0 National Olympiad Prove it United States

Problem:

Rachel has the number 10001000 in her hands. When she puts the number xx in her left pocket, the number changes to x+1x+1. When she puts the number xx in her right pocket, the number changes to x1x^{-1}. Each minute, she flips a fair coin. If it lands heads, she puts the number into her left pocket, and if it lands tails, she puts it into her right pocket. She then takes the new number out of her pocket. If the expected value of the number in Rachel's hands after eight minutes is EE, then compute E10\left\lfloor\frac{E}{10}\right\rfloor.

Solution

Solution:

Call a real number very large if x[1000,1008]x \in [1000, 1008], very small if x[0,11000]x \in \left[0, \frac{1}{1000}\right], and medium-sized if x[18,8]x \in \left[\frac{1}{8}, 8\right]. Every number Rachel is ever holding after at most 88 steps will fall under one of these categories. Therefore the main contribution to EE will come from the probability that Rachel is holding a number at least 10001000 at the end.

Note that if her number ever becomes medium-sized, it will never become very large or very small again. Therefore the only way her number ends up above 10001000 is if the sequence of moves consists of xx+1x \rightarrow x+1 moves and consecutive pairs of xx1x \rightarrow x^{-1} moves. Out of the 256256 possible move sequences, the number of ways for the number to stay above 10001000 is the number of ways of partitioning 88 into an ordered sum of 11 and 22, or the ninth Fibonacci number F9=34F_{9} = 34.

Therefore
342561000E342561000+8 \frac{34}{256} \cdot 1000 \leq E \leq \frac{34}{256} \cdot 1000 + 8
where 342561000132.8\frac{34}{256} \cdot 1000 \approx 132.8. Furthermore, the extra contribution will certainly not exceed 77, so we get that E10=13\left\lfloor\frac{E}{10}\right\rfloor = 13.

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