Problem:
Bob is coloring lattice points in the coordinate plane. Find the number of ways Bob can color five points in blue such that the distance between any two blue points is not an integer.
Problem:
Bob is coloring lattice points in the coordinate plane. Find the number of ways Bob can color five points in blue such that the distance between any two blue points is not an integer.
Solution:
We can see that no two blue points can have the same or coordinate. The blue points then must make a permutation of that avoid the pattern of -- triangles. It is not hard to use complementary counting to get the answer from here.
There are possible pairs of points that are a distance of apart while not being in the same row or column (i.e. a pair that is in the -- position). If such a pair of points is included in the choice of five points, then there are possibilities for the remaining three points, yielding configurations that have violations. However, we now need to consider overcounting.
The only way to have more than one violation in one configuration is to have a corner point and then two points adjacent to the opposite corner, e.g. . In each such case, there are exactly possibilities for the other two points, and there are exactly two violations so there are a total of configurations that are double-counted.
Therefore, there are permutations that violate the no-integer-condition, leaving good configurations.