Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /53 of 68

, 2017

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.8 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

The game of Penta is played with teams of five players each, and there are five roles the players can play. Each of the five players chooses two of five roles they wish to play. If each player chooses their roles randomly, what is the probability that each role will have exactly two players?

Solution

Solution:

Consider a graph with five vertices corresponding to the roles, and draw an edge between two vertices if a player picks both roles. Thus there are exactly 55 edges in the graph, and we want to find the probability that each vertex has degree 22. In particular, we want to find the probability that the graph is composed entirely of cycles.

Thus there are two cases. The first case is when the graph is itself a 55-cycle. There are 4!4! ways to choose such a directed cycle (pick an arbitrary vertex AA and consider a vertex it connects to, etc.), and thus 4!2=12\frac{4!}{2} = 12 ways for the undirected graph to be a 55-cycle. Now, there are 5!5! ways to assign the edges in this cycle to people, giving a total contribution of 125!12 \cdot 5!.

The second case is when the graph is composed of a 22-cycle and a 33-cycle, which only requires choosing the two vertices to be the 22-cycle, and so there are (52)=10\binom{5}{2} = 10 ways. To assign the players to edges, there are (52)=10\binom{5}{2} = 10 ways to assign the players to the 22-cycle. For the 33-cycle, any of the 3!=63! = 6 permutations of the remaining 33 players work. The total contribution is 1010610 \cdot 10 \cdot 6.

Therefore, our answer is
12120+10106105=512500 \frac{12 \cdot 120 + 10 \cdot 10 \cdot 6}{10^5} = \frac{51}{2500}

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