Let . Consider a partition of into for some , i.e. are nonempty, pairwise disjoint and . Let be the average of elements of the set . Define the score of this partition by
Among all and partitions of , determine the minimum possible score.
Solution
The minimum possible score is .
Suppose we have a partition with score .
Claim 1. If there are at least two subsets, say , both with averages at least , then merging these two subsets into one subset will not increase the score.
Proof. Let be the new average of the merged set. Note that . Together with , we obtain . It follows that
This means the new score is at most .
Claim 2. If there is a subset, say , with average at most and having at least two elements, then it is possible to split it into two subsets so that the score does not increase.
Proof. Let be the smallest element in . We split into and . The new averages of these two sets are and respectively. Now, we have
This means the new score is at most .
Using the above claims, we merge any two subsets with scores above average and subdivide any subset with score below average into singletons. Also, if there are subsets and for which , then we can swap and to get the subsets and so that the average decreases, since
if .
Therefore, the optimal case must be of the form
for some . The score is
by the AM-GM inequality. In other words, the minimum score is , which is attained when .