Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /655 of 740

, 2018

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.5 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

20 players are playing in a Super Smash Bros. Melee tournament. They are ranked 1201-20, and player nn will always beat player mm if n<mn < m. Out of all possible tournaments where each player plays 18 distinct other players exactly once, one is chosen uniformly at random. Find the expected number of pairs of players that win the same number of games.

Proposed by: Anders Olsen

Solution

Solution:

Consider instead the complement of the tournament: The 10 possible matches that are not played. In order for each player to play 18 games in the tournament, each must appear once in these 10 unplayed matches. Players nn and n+1n+1 will win the same number of games if, in the matching, they are matched with each other, or nn plays a player a>n+1a > n+1 and n+1n+1 plays a player b<nb < n. (Note no other pairs of players can possibly win the same number of games.) The first happens with probability 119\frac{1}{19} (as there are 19 players for player nn to be paired with), and the second happens with probability (n1)(20n1)1917\frac{(n-1)(20-n-1)}{19 \cdot 17}.

By linearity of expectation, the expected number of pairs of players winning the same number of games is the sum of these probabilities. We compute
n=119(119+(n1)(20n1)323)=n=018(119+n(18n)323)=1+(193)323=4 \sum_{n=1}^{19}\left(\frac{1}{19}+\frac{(n-1)(20-n-1)}{323}\right)=\sum_{n=0}^{18}\left(\frac{1}{19}+\frac{n(18-n)}{323}\right)=1+\frac{\binom{19}{3}}{323}=4

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