Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /13 of 20

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.7 AIME, harder Prove it Romania

Weights of 1 g1\ \mathrm{g}, 2 g2\ \mathrm{g}, \ldots, 200 g200\ \mathrm{g} are placed on the two pans of a balance such that on each pan there are 100100 weights and the balance is in equilibrium. Prove that one can swap 5050 weights from one pan with 5050 weights from the other pan such that the balance remains in equilibrium.

Solution

We call a pair two weights whose sum is 201 g201\ \mathrm{g}. We wish to obtain, in the end, 5050 pairs on each of the two pans of the balance.

If on the pan on the left we have the weights a1,a2,,a50a_1, a_2, \dots, a_{50} and their pairs b1,b2,,b50b_1, b_2, \dots, b_{50} are on the pan on the right, we move the weights such that, in the end, on the left pan we have the weights a1,a2,,a50a_1, a_2, \dots, a_{50} together with their pairs, b1,b2,,b50b_1, b_2, \dots, b_{50}.

If we have less than 5050 pairs that are split between the two pans, we must have at least 2525 pairs on the left pan and (at least) 2525 pairs on the right pan. Moving 2525 complete pairs from the right pan next to 2525 pairs from the left pan, we obtain, again, 5050 complete pairs on one pan, hence the desired result.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

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