Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.2 National Olympiad Find the answer Italy

Problem:

In a game of Riemannian ball two teams face each other; at every moment, each team fields k>1k>1 players. At the end of each play a point is awarded to one of the two teams; moreover, each team may make an arbitrary number of substitutions before the next play begins. Alice and Barbara are part of the Geodesics team. At the end of today's match, Alice observes that, while she was on the field, the Geodesics won 7 plays more than they lost. When Barbara was on the field, on the other hand, they lost 2 plays more than they won. Each of the other players of the Geodesics took part in exactly as many winning plays as losing plays. What is the value of kk?

Pick one

Solution

Solution:

The answer is (B)\mathbf{(B)}. Let us build a table with one row for each play played and one column for each player of the Geodesics. We write +1 in a cell if the player corresponding to the row was on the field during the play corresponding to the column and the play was won by the Geodesics. Similarly, we write -1 for the pairs (player, play) given by the plays lost by the Geodesics with that player on the field. Finally, we write 0 in the cells corresponding to pairs (player, play) for which the player was not on the field in the corresponding play. Let us now consider the sum of all the numbers in the table.

By hypothesis we know that Alice's column sums to +7, Barbara's column sums to -2, and all the other columns sum to 0. The sum of all the numbers in the table is therefore 5. On the other hand, each row of the table has sum +k+k (if the play was won by the Geodesics) or k-k (if it was lost): indeed, in each row there are exactly kk nonzero numbers (corresponding to the kk players on the field), and they are either all equal to +1, if the play was won by the Geodesics, or all equal to -1, otherwise. Denoting then by VV and PP the number of plays won and the number of plays lost by the Geodesics, we have obtained the equation 5=k(VP)5 = k(V-P). From this it follows that kk divides 5, and since k>1k > 1 we have k=5k = 5.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.