Competition problem — Combinatorics

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Combinatorics Difficulty 3.0 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

In the figure below, $3$ of the $6$ disks are to be painted blue, $2$ are to be painted red, and $1$ is to be painted green. Two paintings that can be obtained from one another by a rotation or a reflection of the entire figure are considered the same. How many different paintings are possible?

Figure (Asymptote source)

size(110); pair A, B, C, D, E, F; A = (0,0); B = (1,0); C = (2,0); D = rotate(60, A)*B; E = B + D; F = rotate(60, A)*C; draw(Circle(A, 0.5)); draw(Circle(B, 0.5)); draw(Circle(C, 0.5)); draw(Circle(D, 0.5)); draw(Circle(E, 0.5)); draw(Circle(F, 0.5));

Pick one

Solution

First we figure out the number of ways to put the $3$ blue disks. Denote the spots to put the disks as $1-6$ from left to right, top to bottom. The cases to put the blue disks are $(1,2,3),(1,2,4),(1,2,5),(1,2,6),(2,3,5),(1,4,6)$ . For each of those cases we can easily figure out the number of ways for each case, so the total amount is $2+2+3+3+1+1 = \boxed{\textbf{(D) } 12}$ .

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Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic and difficulty added by this site.