Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.5 National Olympiad Prove it Argentina

Players AA and BB play the following game on a band of consecutive unit cells infinite in one direction. On each move of his, AA marks two arbitrary cells that were not marked before. On each move of his, BB deletes any block of consecutive marks. The goal of AA is to obtain 1010 consecutive marks, the goal of BB is to impede him. Which one has a winning strategy?

Solution

Player AA has a winning strategy. On his first 272^7 moves he marks 282^8 arbitrary cells so that the distance of every two of them is at least 1010. Such marks are not consecutive, so every time BB deletes exactly one mark on his move. Thus after 272^7 combined moves of the two there are 272^7 marks at distances at least 1010. Denote the group of these marks by GG.

On each of his next 262^6 moves AA marks cells to the left of two different cells from GG, thus forming blocks of marks with length 22. Since BB can delete at most one such block at a time, 262^6 combined moves leave at least 262^6 blocks of marks with length 22.

Similarly, AA starts forming pairs of blocks with length 33 on each of his next 252^5 moves. Again BB can delete at most one such block on each move, hence after 252^5 combined moves there remain at least 252^5 blocks of marks with length 33.

Proceeding analogously, AA can ensure that after some move of BB there will be 242^4 blocks of length 44, then 232^3 blocks of length 55, 222^2 blocks of length 66, 21=22^1 = 2 blocks of length 77 and finally 11 block KK of length 88. Now it is AA's turn to move, and he wins by marking the two cells to the left of KK.

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