Maths Olympiad Prep

Track / Stage 5 / 70 of 400 #670 of 1964

Problem 670

AIME late
Combinatorics Difficulty 5.2 Find the answer

3. On a line, there are 16 points A1,A16A_{1}, \ldots A_{16}, spaced 1 cm1 \mathrm{~cm} apart. Misha constructs circles according to the following rules:

a) The circles do not intersect or touch.

b) Inside each circle, there is at least one of the specified points A1,A16\mathrm{A}_{1}, \ldots \mathrm{A}_{16}.

c) None of these points lie on the circle.

d) Different circles contain different sets of points. For example, if one circle contains points A1\mathrm{A}_{1} and A2\mathrm{A}_{2} inside and the rest outside, then it is not possible to construct another circle that contains only A1\mathrm{A}_{1} and A2\mathrm{A}_{2} inside.

What is the maximum number of circles Misha can construct according to these rules?

Answer: 31.

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

Official solution

Solution: We can represent such a system of circles as a tree with 16 leaves.

In such a tree, there cannot be more than 31 nodes. It is easy to construct a binary tree in which there are exactly 31 nodes.

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