Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.0 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:
Compute the number of sets SS such that every element of SS is a nonnegative integer less than 1616, and if xSx \in S then (2xmod16)S(2x \bmod 16) \in S.

Solution

Solution:
Figure 1
For any nonempty SS we must have 0S0 \in S. Now if we draw a directed graph of dependencies among the non-zero elements, it creates a balanced binary tree where every leaf has depth 33. In the diagram, if aa is a parent of bb it means that if bSb \in S, then aa must also be in SS.

We wish to find the number of subsets of nodes such that every node in the set also has its parent in the set. We do this with recursion. Let f(n)f(n) denote the number of such sets on a balanced binary tree of depth nn. If the root vertex is not in the set, then the set must be empty. Otherwise, we can consider each subtree separately. This gives the recurrence f(n)=f(n1)2+1f(n) = f(n-1)^2 + 1. We know f(0)=2f(0) = 2, so we can calculate f(1)=5f(1) = 5, f(2)=26f(2) = 26, f(3)=677f(3) = 677. We add 11 at the end for the empty set. Hence our answer is f(3)+1=678f(3) + 1 = 678.

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