Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.1 AIME, harder Prove it United States

Problem:

Consider a 6×66 \times 6 grid of squares. Edmond chooses four of these squares uniformly at random. What is the probability that the centers of these four squares form a square?

Solution

Solution:

Firstly, there are (364)\binom{36}{4} possible combinations of points. Call a square proper if its sides are parallel to the coordinate axes and improper otherwise. Note that every improper square can be inscribed in a unique proper square. Hence, an n×nn \times n proper square represents a total of nn squares: 1 proper and n1n-1 improper.

There are thus a total of
i=16i(6i)2=i=16(i312i2+36i)=i=16i312i=16i2+36i=16i=44112(91)+36(21)=4411092+756=105 \begin{aligned} \sum_{i=1}^{6} i(6-i)^{2} & =\sum_{i=1}^{6}\left(i^{3}-12 i^{2}+36 i\right) \\ & =\sum_{i=1}^{6} i^{3}-12 \sum_{i=1}^{6} i^{2}+36 \sum_{i=1}^{6} i \\ & =441-12(91)+36(21) \\ & =441-1092+756 \\ & =105 \end{aligned}
squares on the grid. Our desired probability is thus 105(364)=1561\frac{105}{\binom{36}{4}}=\frac{1}{561}.

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