Problem:
A bulldozer is touring Pascal's triangle. It starts at the top of the triangle, at . Each move, it travels to an adjacent positive integer, but can never return to a spot it has already visited. Moreover, if it has visited two numbers , it may not visit or . Finally, the bulldozer is confined to the first 140 rows of Pascal's triangle.
Prove that the bulldozer may visit at least 2017 numbers. (By convention, the th row contains the entries for , hence the th row has entries.)
Solution
Solution:
The main idea is to visit odd numbers!
We claim inductively that the first rows of Pascal's triangle satisfy the following properties:
- The th row contains only odd numbers.
- The first rows contain odd numbers.
- When taken modulo 2, there is 120 degree symmetry
- There is a path starting at any corner to any other corner through only odd numbers.
Indeed this is clear for . For the inductive step, let denote the shape of the first rows modulo 2. Note that row contains all even numbers except the endpoints . Thus in fact we get two side-by-side copies of the triangle , which meet on row and thus have all ones. (Between the two copies of we get an inverted triangle having all entries 0.) From these observations, we see that all statements in the inductive hypothesis hold.
Thus, we may visit odd numbers from rows 1 to 128. In doing so, we visit odd numbers.