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Combinatorics Difficulty 7.1 National Olympiad, round 2 Prove it Italy

Problem:

We say that a positive integer with an even number of digits is "correct" if, reading the individual digits aloud, we obtain a correct description of the number itself. More precisely, if every digit in an odd position indicates how many times the following digit appears in the whole number.
For example, 12101210 is correct, because it has "one 22, one 00", as is 21212121, because it has "two 11, two 11", while 10311031 is not, because it declares to have "one 00, three 11", when it actually has two 11's.

a. Prove that there are more than 20192019 correct numbers.
b. Prove that the correct integers are finite in number.
c. Find the number of digits of the largest correct number.

Solution

Solution:

a. The number A=12131415161718\mathcal{A} = 12131415161718 is correct. Since a correct description of the number does not depend on the order, by splitting A\mathcal{A} into blocks of two consecutive digits

| 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 |
| :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- | :--- |

and permuting them among themselves we obtain different correct numbers. The number of permutations of seven distinct blocks is
7!=5040>2019 7! = 5040 > 2019

b. Every correct number is made up of two-digit blocks abab whose first digit describes the second. A digit that is described in some block can appear at most 99 times in the whole number: otherwise it could not have been correctly described in the block in question. This observation immediately limits the number of blocks to nine per digit, that is 910=909 \cdot 10 = 90, hence the number of digits to 902=18090 \cdot 2 = 180.
The integers with at most 180180 digits (and, consequently, the correct ones) are finite in number.

c. Let us refine the upper estimate from the previous point: if a natural number has more than 9191 digits then, by the pigeonhole principle, there is a digit that appears at least 1010 times and that therefore can never be described. Observing that the number of blocks in a correct number is at most nine times the number of digits that are described, we obtain an upper bound of 99=819 \cdot 9 = 81 blocks, which corresponds to a bound of 812=16281 \cdot 2 = 162 digits.

We now expect that the largest correct number is
G=9898989 blocks 9797979 blocks  9090909 blocks, \mathcal{G} = \underbrace{9898 \ldots 98}_{9\ \text{blocks}}\ \underbrace{9797 \ldots 97}_{9\ \text{blocks}}\ \ldots\ \underbrace{9090 \ldots 90}_{9\ \text{blocks}},
but it will not be necessary to prove this. Once it has been observed that it has 992=1629 \cdot 9 \cdot 2 = 162 digits, the proof is concluded: even if there existed a correct number larger than G\mathcal{G}, it would still have 162162 digits.

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