Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 6.8 National olympiad Prove it Netherlands

Sara has 10 blocks numbered 11 to 1010. She wants to stack all the blocks into a tower. A block can only be put on top of a block with a higher number, or on top of a block with a number that is exactly one lower. An example of such a tower is, from top to bottom: 22, 11, 55, 44, 33, 66, 77, 99, 88, 1010.
How many different towers are possible?

Solution

We will first look at the problem for a smaller number of blocks. With 11 block, only 11 tower is possible. With 22 blocks, both towers (top) 11-22 (bottom) and 22-11 are possible. With 33 blocks, these are the possible towers: 11-22-33, 22-11-33, 11-33-22, and 33-22-11. It seems that the number of towers doubles each time. We are going to prove this. Starting from a tower with n>1n > 1 blocks, consider the block with the highest number, nn. If this block lies on top of another block, then this must be a block with a lower number (as there does not exist a block with a higher number), and according to the requirements it has to lie on the block with number n1n-1. Hence, block nn lies either completely on the bottom, or directly on top of block n1n-1. Because all other blocks can also lie on top of block n1n-1, we see that after removing block nn, we are left with a valid tower of n1n-1 blocks.

Now we want to show that from any (valid) tower of n1n-1 blocks we can make a valid tower of nn blocks. In every (valid) tower of n1n-1 blocks we can insert block nn either at the bottom or directly on top of block n1n-1; other places are not allowed and in this way block nn never lies on a block with a number that is too small. In both cases the tower of nn blocks is a valid one, because on top of block nn any other block is allowed. So from any valid tower of n1n-1 blocks we can make two valid towers of nn blocks.

So we see that the number of towers indeed doubles every time. For n=1n=1 there is 1=201 = 2^0 tower, for n=2n=2 there are 2=212 = 2^1 towers and in general there are 2n12^{n-1} towers. So the number of towers with 1010 blocks is 29=5122^9 = 512.

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Source: MathNet, licensed CC-BY-4.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.