Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /100 of 105

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.7 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
A bulldozer is touring Pascal's triangle. It starts at the top of the triangle, at (00)=1\left(\begin{array}{l}0 \\ 0\end{array}\right)=1. 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 a>ba>b, it may not visit a+ba+b or aba-b. 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 nnth row contains the entries (n1k)\left(\begin{array}{c}n-1 \\ k\end{array}\right) for k=0,,n1k=0, \ldots, n-1, hence the nnth row has nn entries.)

Solution

Solution:
The main idea is to visit odd numbers!
We claim inductively that the first 2n2^{n} rows of Pascal's triangle satisfy the following properties:
- The 2n2^{n}th row contains only odd numbers.
- The first 2n2^{n} rows contain 3n3^{n} 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 n=1n=1. For the inductive step, let TT denote the shape of the first 2n2^{n} rows modulo 2. Note that row 2n+12^{n}+1 contains all even numbers except the endpoints (2n0)=(2n2n)=1\left(\begin{array}{c}2^{n} \\ 0\end{array}\right)=\left(\begin{array}{c}2^{n} \\ 2^{n}\end{array}\right)=1. Thus in fact we get two side-by-side copies of the triangle TT, which meet on row 2n+12^{n+1} and thus have all ones. (Between the two copies of TT 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 37=21873^{7}=2187 odd numbers.

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