Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.8 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

Po picks 100 points P1,P2,,P100P_{1}, P_{2}, \ldots, P_{100} on a circle independently and uniformly at random. He then draws the line segments connecting P1P2,P2P3,,P100P1P_{1} P_{2}, P_{2} P_{3}, \ldots, P_{100} P_{1}. When all of the line segments are drawn, the circle is divided into a number of regions. Find the expected number of regions that have all sides bounded by straight lines.

Solution

Solution:

If the 100 segments do not intersect on the interior, then the circle will be cut into 101 regions. By Euler's formula, each additional intersection cuts two edges into two each, and adds one more vertex, so since VE+FV-E+F is constant, there will be one more region as well. It then suffices to compute the expected number of intersections, where two segments that share a vertex are not counted as intersections.

We use linearity of expectation to compute this value. It suffices to compute the expected number of segments that each segment intersects. Consider one such segment P1P2P_{1} P_{2}. It cannot possibly intersect a segment that shares an endpoint, so that leaves 97 possible other segments. Again, by linearity of expectation, it suffices to compute the probability that P1P2P_{1} P_{2} intersects PiPi+1P_{i} P_{i+1}. However, since each of the points was chosen uniformly at random, this is equal to the probability that ACAC intersects BDBD, where A,B,C,DA, B, C, D are chosen uniformly at random from the circle. Since this probability is 1/31/3, each segment intersects with 973\frac{97}{3} segments on average.

Now, we can sum over all segments and divide by two to get (100973100 \cdot \frac{97}{3}) /2=48503/ 2 = \frac{4850}{3} intersections, since each intersection is counted twice. Accounting for the fact that there are 101 regions to begin with, and exactly 100 of them have an arc on the boundary, we get 48503+101100=48533\frac{4850}{3} + 101 - 100 = \frac{4853}{3} as the answer.

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