CombinatoricsDifficulty 5.7AIME, harderProve itUnited States
Problem:
In a classroom, 34 students are seated in 5 rows of 7 chairs. The place at the center of the room is unoccupied. A teacher decides to reassign the seats such that each student will occupy a chair adjacent to his/her present one (i.e. move one desk forward, back, left or right). In how many ways can this reassignment be made?
Solution
Solution:
Color the chairs red and black in checkerboard fashion, with the center chair black. Then all 18 red chairs are initially occupied. Also notice that adjacent chairs have different colors. It follows that we need 18 black chairs to accommodate the reassignment, but there are only 17 of them. Thus, the answer is 0.
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.