Problem:
Let . Let be such that any nonnegative integer can be written as where the nonnegative integers have all their digits in . Find the smallest possible number of elements in .
Problem:
Let . Let be such that any nonnegative integer can be written as where the nonnegative integers have all their digits in . Find the smallest possible number of elements in .
Solution:
We show that 5 numbers will suffice. Take . Observe the following splitting:
| 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2 | 1 | 1 |
| 3 | 0 | 3 |
| 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 5 | 1 | 4 |
| 6 | 3 | 3 |
| 7 | 3 | 4 |
| 8 | 4 | 4 |
| 9 | 3 | 6 |
We show that . Suppose . We may take as adding extra numbers to does not alter our argument. Let . Since the last digit can be any one of the numbers , we must be able to write this as a sum of digits from , modulo 10. Thus the collection
must contain as a subset. But has at most 10 elements . Thus each element of the form , as vary over , must give different numbers from .
Consider modulo 10. They must give 4 even numbers. Hence the remaining even number must be from the remaining 6 elements obtained by adding two distinct members of . We may assume that even number is . Then must have same parity. If any one of has same parity as that of , then its sum with gives an even number, which is impossible. Hence must have same parity, in which case is even, which leads to a contradiction. We conclude that .