Maths Olympiad Prep

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Combinatorics Difficulty 5.3 AIME, harder Find the answer

The skeletal structure of circumcircumcircumcoronene, a hydrocarbon with the chemical formula C150H30\mathrm{C}_{150} \mathrm{H}_{30}, is shown below. Each line segment between two atoms is at least a single bond. However, since each carbon (C) requires exactly four bonds connected to it and each hydrogen (H)(\mathrm{H}) requires exactly one bond, some of the line segments are actually double bonds. How many arrangements of single/double bonds are there such that the above requirements are satisfied? If the correct answer is CC and your answer is AA, you get max(30(1loglog2CAC),0)\max \left(\left\lfloor 30\left(1-\left|\log _{\log _{2} C} \frac{A}{C}\right|\right)\right\rfloor, 0\right) points.

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

Solution

The problem is equivalent to the one in OEIS A008793, a.k.a. "number of ways to tile hexagon of edge n with diamonds of side 1." Notice that there is a bjiection between such a tiling and the number of ways to stack some unit cubes alongside a corner of an n×n×nn \times n \times n box (see the Art of Problem Solving logo as an example, also known as 3 -dimensional Young diagrams), where this problem n=5n=5. It is known that there are (2nn)=252\binom{2 n}{n}=252 ways to stack one layer (since each way correspond a way to walk from a corner of a 5 by 5 grid to the opposite one), so 25255!8×109\frac{252^{5}}{5!} \approx 8 \times 10^{9} gives a somewhat loose upper bound (generate five layers and sort them by size, and hope that it will be a valid stack in general). This result can be improved by dividing out a reasonable constant factor after considering the probability that sorting by size indeed gives a valid stack (for example, it would be fair to guess that there is about a 14!\frac{1}{4!} chance that the first row of each layer will be in the right order, given that each row has a small role in determining the final size of the layer; dividing 24 from the previous result gives a very close guess). In general, a guess anywhere between 10810^{8} and 10910^{9} is a fair guess.

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