Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

A knight begins on the lower-left square of a standard chessboard. How many squares could the knight end up at after exactly 2009 legal knight's moves? (A knight's move is 2 squares either horizontally or vertically, followed by 1 square in a direction perpendicular to the first.)

Solution

Solution:

Answer: 32

The knight goes from a black square to a white square on every move, or vice versa, so after 2009 moves he must be on a square whose color is opposite of what he started on. So he can only land on half the squares after 2009 moves. Note that he can access any of the 32 squares (there are no other parity issues) because any single jump can also be accomplished in 3 jumps, so with 2009 jumps, he can land on any of the squares of the right color.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement reproduced verbatim; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.