Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /14 of 1394

, 2019

Combinatorics Difficulty 4.5 AIME Find the answer United States

Problem:

Bob is coloring lattice points in the coordinate plane. Find the number of ways Bob can color five points in {(x,y)1x,y5}\{(x, y) \mid 1 \leq x, y \leq 5\} blue such that the distance between any two blue points is not an integer.

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Solution

Solution:

We can see that no two blue points can have the same xx or yy coordinate. The blue points then must make a permutation of 1,2,3,4,51,2,3,4,5 that avoid the pattern of 33-44-55 triangles. It is not hard to use complementary counting to get the answer from here.

There are 88 possible pairs of points that are a distance of 55 apart while not being in the same row or column (i.e. a pair that is in the 33-44-55 position). If such a pair of points is included in the choice of five points, then there are 3!=63! = 6 possibilities for the remaining three points, yielding 8×6=488 \times 6 = 48 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. (1,1),(4,5),(5,4)(1,1), (4,5), (5,4). In each such case, there are exactly 2!=22! = 2 possibilities for the other two points, and there are exactly two violations so there are a total of 2×4=82 \times 4 = 8 configurations that are double-counted.

Therefore, there are 488=4048 - 8 = 40 permutations that violate the no-integer-condition, leaving 12040=80120 - 40 = 80 good configurations.

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