Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /3 of 4

Combinatorics Difficulty 6.8 National Olympiad Prove it Baltic Way

Let n>2n > 2 be a natural number. In the country there are nn cities and every two of them are connected by a direct road. We enumerate roads with numbers 1,2,,m1, 2, \ldots, m (we can assign the same number to several roads, even if they are going from the same city), where mm is a natural number. The ID of a city is a sum of numbers assigned to roads which are going from it. Find the smallest mm such that it is possible to enumerate the roads in such way that ID's of the cities are all distinct.

Solution

We will show that m=3m = 3 for every n>2n > 2.

Firstly we show that m3m \ge 3. It is clear that m2m \ge 2, so suppose that m=2m = 2. We have nn cities, and the possible numbers for the sum of numbers assigned to roads going out from the given city are n1,n,n+1,,2n2n-1, n, n+1, \dots, 2n-2 (the smallest possible sum is 1+1++1=n11+1+\dots+1 = n-1 and the largest is 2+2++2=2(n1)2+2+\dots+2 = 2(n-1)). Since there are exactly nn of them, every number is ID for some city. But it means that there is a city with every road having a number 11 and a city with every road having a number 22. But this is a contradiction since these cities are connected.

Now we will show that we can enumerate the roads with numbers 1,2,31, 2, 3 such that the condition will be satisfied. Suppose that n=2kn = 2k. We will construct our enumeration in steps. To all roads from the first city assign the number 11. Do the same with the second but assign the number 22 to the road going to the (2k1)(2k-1)-th city. For the third city assign 22 to (2k1)(2k-1), (2k2)(2k-2)-th cities. Continue this operation to the kk-th city. Then the situation is: cities 1,2,,k1, 2, \ldots, k have the ID 2k1,2k,2k+1,,3k22k-1, 2k, 2k+1, \ldots, 3k-2 respectively (and we have finished assigning the number to their roads) and the cities k+1,k+2,,2k1k+1, k+2, \ldots, 2k-1 have the ID's k,k+1,,2k2,2k1k, k+1, \ldots, 2k-2, 2k-1 respectively. So now it suffices to assign number 33 to every road between cities k+1,k+2,,2k1k+1, k+2, \ldots, 2k-1 and it is easy to see that all ID's are different. For the odd nn we use a very similar argument.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

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