Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /378 of 520

Combinatorics Difficulty 3.5 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

How many positive integers less than 10,000 have at most two different digits?

A number or a short expression. Spacing and $ signs are ignored.

Solution

First, let's count numbers with only a single digit. We have nine of these for each length, and four lengths, so 36 total numbers.
Now, let's count those with two distinct digits. We handle the cases "0 included" and "0 not included" separately.
There are (92){9 \choose 2} ways to choose two digits, AA and BB. Given two digits, there are 2n22^n - 2 ways to arrange them in an nn-digit number, for a total of (212)+(222)+(232)+(242)=22(2^1 - 2) + (2^2 - 2) + (2^3 -2) + (2^4 - 2) = 22 such numbers (or we can list them: AB,BA,AAB,ABA,BAA,ABB,BAB,BBA,AAAB,AABA,ABAA,AB, BA, AAB, ABA, BAA, ABB, BAB, BBA, AAAB, AABA, ABAA, BAAA,AABB,ABAB,BAAB,ABBA,BABA,BBAA,ABBB,BABB,BBAB,BBBABAAA, AABB, ABAB, BAAB, ABBA, BABA, BBAA, ABBB, BABB, BBAB, BBBA). Thus, we have (92)22=3622=792{9 \choose 2} \cdot 22 = 36\cdot22 = 792 numbers of this form.
Now, suppose 0 is one of our digits. We have nine choices for the other digit. For each choice, we have 2n112^{n - 1} - 1 nn-digit numbers we can form, for a total of (201)+(211)+(221)+(231)=11(2^0 - 1) + (2^1 - 1) + (2^2 - 1) + (2^3 - 1) = 11 such numbers (or we can list them: A0,A00,A0A,AA0,A000,AA00,A0A0,A00A,AAA0,AA0A,A0AAA0, A00, A0A, AA0, A000, AA00, A0A0, A00A, AAA0, AA0A, A0AA). This gives us 911=999\cdot 11 = 99 numbers of this form.
Thus, in total, we have 36+792+99=92736 + 792 + 99 = \boxed{927} such numbers.

Want a route through all this instead of an archive? The track puts 2,000 problems in a working order, from AMC 10 level to the IMO shortlist.

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