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Advanced Combinatorial Algorithms: Pranav Sriram India Math Olympiad Orientation Camp 2021

This document contains 13 challenging combinatorial algorithms problems from various international math olympiads and competitions. The problems cover topics like graph theory, number theory, set theory, and more. Advanced techniques mentioned that may help solve the problems include greedy algorithms, local search, invariants, perturbations, and extremal principles. Creativity along with these techniques is needed to solve problems from this harder end of the olympiad spectrum.

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Upaj Dhakal
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178 views

Advanced Combinatorial Algorithms: Pranav Sriram India Math Olympiad Orientation Camp 2021

This document contains 13 challenging combinatorial algorithms problems from various international math olympiads and competitions. The problems cover topics like graph theory, number theory, set theory, and more. Advanced techniques mentioned that may help solve the problems include greedy algorithms, local search, invariants, perturbations, and extremal principles. Creativity along with these techniques is needed to solve problems from this harder end of the olympiad spectrum.

Uploaded by

Upaj Dhakal
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Advanced Combinatorial Algorithms

Pranav Sriram
India Math Olympiad Orientation Camp 2021

1
Introduction

In the next two lectures we will look at some more challenging applications of
the ideas discussed in Lecture 1. Some general ideas and techniques to keep in
mind are:
• Greedy Algorithms
Make good short-term decisions.
• Local Search
Move towards a desired goal incrementally, by making a sequence of local
transformations.
• Invariants and Monovariants
In a process where something changes in a complicated way, find quantities
or substructures that change in well-behaved ways.

• Good and Bad Objects


Reformulate a problem in terms of eliminating bad objects.
• Perturbations
Exploit the fact that making small perturbations to an object results in
associated quantities changing by small amounts. Sliding windows is a
special case of this.
• Extremal Principle
Look at structures that are extremal in some sense.
• Graph Theory
Leverage elementary graph theoretic results.
The problems in this handout mostly come from the harder end of the Olympiad
spectrum. However, they can all be solved using nothing more than the above
ideas, along with a little creativity.

1
2
Problems

Problem 1 [IMO Shortlist 2002, C5]


Let r ≥ 2 be a fixed positive integer, and let F be an infinite family of sets,
each of size r, no two of which are disjoint. Prove that there exists a set of size
r − 1 that meets each set in F .

Problem 2 [China TST 2015]


Let X be a finite non-empty set. Let A1 , ..., Ak be k subsets of X, satisfying:

(1) |Ai | ≤ 3, for each i = 1, 2, ..., k


(2) Any element of X is an element of at least 4 sets among A1 , ...., Ak .
 3k 
Show that one can select 7 sets from A1 , ..., Ak such that their union is X.

Problem 3 [IMO Shortlist 2006, C4]


A cake has the form of an n x n square composed of n2 unit squares. Strawber-
ries lie on some of the unit squares so that each row or column contains exactly
one strawberry; call this arrangement A.

Let B be another such arrangement. Suppose that every grid rectangle with
one vertex at the top left corner of the cake contains no fewer strawberries of
arrangement B than of arrangement A. Prove that arrangement B can be ob-
tained from A by performing a number of switches, defined as follows:

A switch consists in selecting a grid rectangle with only two strawberries, sit-
uated at its top right corner and bottom left corner, and moving these two
strawberries to the other two corners of that rectangle.

Problem 4 [IMO Shortlist 2011 C6]


Let n be a positive integer, and let W = . . . x−1 x0 x1 x2 . . . be an infinite periodic
word, consisting of just letters a and/or b. Suppose that the minimal period N
of W is greater than 2n . A finite nonempty word U is said to appear in W if
there exist indices k ≤ ` such that U = xk xk+1 . . . x` . A finite word U is called
ubiquitous if the four words U a, U b, aU , and bU all appear in W .

Prove that there are at least n ubiquitous finite nonempty words.

Problem 5 [All-Russian Olympiad, 2000]


One hundred natural numbers whose gcd is 1 are arranged around a circle. An
allowed operation is to add to a number the gcd of its two neighbors. Prove
that we can make all the numbers pairwise coprime in a finite number of moves.

2
Problem 6 [ELMO Shortlist 2011, C5]
Prove there exists a constant c such that for any graph G with n > 2 vertices,
we can split G into a forest and at most cn ln n disjoint cycles.

Problem 7 [IMO Shortlist 2005, C7]


Suppose that a1 , a2 , . . . , an are integers such that n|a1 +a2 +. . .+an . Prove that
there exist two permutations (b1 , b2 , . . . , bn ) and (c1 , c2 , . . . , cn ) of (1, 2, . . . , n)
such that for each integer i with 1 ≤ i ≤ n, we have

n | ai − bi − ci .

Problem 8 [Based on All-Russian Olympiad 2001]


Let T be a tree with 2n leaves. Show that we can add n edges to T , such that
the resulting graph T 0 is 2-edge-connected.

Note: A graph G is said to be 2-edge-connected if the removal of any edge from


G does not disconnect G. More generally, we say a graph is k-edge-connected
if a minimum of k edges must be removed to make the graph disconnected.

Problem 9 [IMO Shortlist 2008, C5]


Let S = {x1 , x2 , . . . , xk+l } be a (k + l)-element set of real numbers contained
in the interval [0, 1]; k and l are positive integers. A k-element subset A ⊂ S is
called nice if

1 X 1 X k+l

k xi − xj ≤
xi ∈A l 2kl
xj ∈S\A

 
2 k+l
Prove that the number of nice subsets is at least .
k+l k

Problem 10 [RMM 2019 Problem 3, Stronger Version]


Show that there exists a constant c √ such that for all sufficiently large n, any
graph on n vertices with at least n + c n edges has two distinct simple cycles of
equal lengths. (Recall that the notion of a simple cycle does not allow repetition
of vertices in a cycle.)

Problem 11 [IMO Shortlist 2012, C5]


The rows and columns of a 3n × 3n square board are numbered 1, 2, . . . , 3n. Ev-
ery square (x, y) with 1 ≤ x, y ≤ 3n is colored asparagus, byzantium or citrine
according as the modulo 3 remainder of x + y is 0, 1 or 2 respectively. One token
colored asparagus, byzantium or citrine is placed on each square, so that there
are 3n2 tokens of each color. Suppose that one can permute the tokens so that
each token is moved to a distance of at most d from its original position, each
asparagus token replaces a byzantium token, each byzantium token replaces a

3
citrine token, and each citrine token replaces an asparagus token.

Prove that it is possible to permute the tokens so that each token is moved to
a distance of at most d + 2 from its original position, and each square contains
a token with the same color as the square.

Problem 12 [IMO Shortlist 2009, C8]


For any integer n ≥ 2, we compute the integer h(n) by applying the following
procedure to its decimal representation. Let r be the rightmost digit of n.

• If r = 0, then the decimal representation of h(n) results from the decimal


representation of n by removing this rightmost digit 0.
• If 1 ≤ r ≤ 9 we split the decimal representation of n into a maximal right
part R that solely consists of digits not less than r and into a left part L
that either is empty or ends with a digit strictly smaller than r. Then the
decimal representation of h(n) consists of the decimal representation of L,
followed by two copies of the decimal representation of R−1. For instance,
for the number 17, 151, 345, 543, we will have L = 17, 151, R = 345, 543
and h(n) = 17, 151, 345, 542, 345, 542.
Prove that, starting with an arbitrary integer n ≥ 2, iterated application of h
produces the integer 1 after finitely many steps.

3
Challenge Problem

Problem 13 [Generalization of China TST 2018, Final Problem]


Let `, m, n be positive integers. Suppose {a1 , . . . a` , b1 , . . . bm , c1 , . . . cn }, are
` + m + n real numbers in the interval [0, 1] . Define

S = {(i, j, k) | ai + bj + ck < 1} , T = {(i, j, k) | ai + bj + ck > 2} .

Show that
2π −1
min(|S|, |T |) ≤ (2 cos ) `mn.
9

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