Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /418 of 520

Combinatorics Difficulty 3.8 AMC 10/12 Find the answer

Six chairs are evenly spaced around a circular table. One person is seated in each chair. Each person gets up and sits down in a chair that is not the same and is not adjacent to the chair he or she originally occupied, so that again one person is seated in each chair. In how many ways can this be done?

Pick one

Solution

Consider shifting every person over three seats left after each person has gotten up and sat back down again. Now, instead of each person being seated not in the same chair and not in an adjacent chair, each person will be seated either in the same chair or an adjacent chair. The problem now becomes the number of ways in which six people can sit down in a chair that is either the same chair or an adjacent chair in a circle.
Consider the similar problem of nn people sitting in a chair that is either the same chair or an adjacent chair in a row. Call the number of possibilities for this FnF_n. Then if the leftmost person stays put, the problem is reduced to a row of n1n-1 chairs, and if the leftmost person shifts one seat to the right, the new person sitting in the leftmost seat must be the person originally second from the left, reducing the problem to a row of n2n-2 chairs. Thus, Fn=Fn1+Fn2F_n = F_{n-1} + F_{n-2} for n3n \geq 3. Clearly F1=1F_1 = 1 and F2=2F_2 = 2, so F3=3F_3 = 3, F4=5F_4 = 5, and F5=8F_5 = 8.
Now consider the six people in a circle and focus on one person. If that person stays put, the problem is reduced to a row of five chairs, for which there are F5=8F_5 = 8 possibilities. If that person moves one seat to the left, then the person who replaces him in his original seat will either be the person originally to the right of him, which will force everyone to simply shift over one seat to the left, or the person originally to the left of him, which reduces the problem to a row of four chairs, for which there are F4=5F_4 = 5 possibilities, giving 1+5=61 + 5 = 6 possibilities in all. By symmetry, if that person moves one seat to the right, there are another 66 possibilities, so we have a total of 8+6+6=(D)  208+6+6 = \boxed{\textbf{(D)}\; 20} possibilities.

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.