Maths Olympiad Prep

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HMMT November

Combinatorics Difficulty 5.2 AIME, harder Find the answer

All positive integers whose binary representations (excluding leading zeroes) have at least as many 1's as 0's are put in increasing order. Compute the number of digits in the binary representation of the 200th number.

A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.

Solution

We do a rough estimation. There are 255 positive integers with at most 8 digits and a majority of them, but not more than 200, satisfy the property. Meanwhile, there are 511 positive integers with at most 9 digits, and a majority of them satisfy this property. Thus, the answer must be greater than 8 and at most 9.

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