Maths Olympiad Prep

Library / /318 of 348

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. Spacing and $ signs are ignored.

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.

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