Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 4.8 AIME Find the answer United States

Each of the 55 sides and the 55 diagonals of a regular pentagon are randomly and independently colored red or blue with equal probability. What is the probability that there will be a triangle whose vertices are among the vertices of the pentagon such that all of its sides have the same color?

A number or a short expression. Spacing and $ signs are ignored.

Solution

It will be easier to compute the probability that no monochromatic triangles exist. Suppose one of the vertices, say AA, has 33 segments of the same color connecting it to 33 other vertices, say BB, CC, and DD. If one of the edges of BCD\triangle BCD has the same color as edges AB\overline{AB}, AC\overline{AC}, and AD\overline{AD}, then a monochromatic triangle exists. Otherwise, BCD\triangle BCD forms a monochromatic triangle of the other color. Therefore in order for there to be no monochromatic triangles, each vertex must be incident to exactly 22 red and 22 blue segments. This is possible only if the coloring creates a loop of 55 segments all colored red and a loop of 55 segments all colored blue.

Figure 1

There are 4!2=12\frac{4!}{2} = 12 choices for the red loop because the loop can always be viewed as starting at a particular vertex and can go in two different directions. There are 2102^{10} different colorings of the 1010 segments. Therefore the requested probability is
112210=13256=253256. 1 - \frac{12}{2^{10}} = 1 - \frac{3}{256} = \frac{253}{256}.

Figure 1

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