Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.8 National Olympiad Prove it Italy

Problem:

Maga Magò has a deck of 52 cards, arranged in a pile, with the backs facing up. Magò separates the packet made up of the seven cards at the top of the pile, flips it over, and puts it at the bottom of the pile. Now all the cards are again in a pile, but not all of them still have their backs facing up: the seven at the bottom are turned the other way. Magò repeats the previous operation until it happens again that all the cards have their backs facing up. In total, how many packets of seven cards has Magò flipped?

Solution

Solution:

Let us color the cards of the deck blue and red, in alternating small groups of three and four respectively. The three at the top are blue, the next four are red, the three after that are blue, and so on. We observe that, when the maga Magò flips a packet, this alternating group coloring is preserved. If we focus our attention on the blue cards only, we see that there are eight groups of three cards, and at each move the topmost group is placed at the bottom of the sequence flipped over. Eight moves are therefore needed to flip over all the groups, and another eight to put them back in their initial orientation. As a result, the blue cards return to being all facing downward every 16 moves. The same happens for the red cards, which form seven groups of four cards, so they return to their initial state every 14 moves. All the cards will then be facing down again for the first time after 112=mcm(16,14)112=\operatorname{mcm}(16,14) moves.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement translated into English from it; metadata (topic, difficulty) added by this project.