Let be a regular -gon. A frog situated at a vertex () can jump to one of the vertices or , the indexes being considered modulo . Determine the set of positive integers for which the frog can make jumps such that it visits all the vertices of the -gon and returns to its starting vertex.
Andrei Eckstein
Solution
If has the given property, denote by the number of jumps of type , and let be the number of jumps of type . Then and , which leads to and . As , we must have either , , or , , or . By only making jumps of type , the frog can visit all the vertices if and only if is odd; making only jumps of type , the frog visits all the vertices if and only if . In conclusion, if has the given property, then either it is not a multiple of , or it is not a multiple of , or it is a multiple of .
Conversely, we have seen that if , then the frog can visit all the vertices by making jumps of a single type.
All that is left is to give an example of a way to choose the frog's jumps in the case when .
There are several such examples. One of them is: the frog jumps (mod ) if and (mod ) if .