Tuesday 21 March 2017

Junior
Years 7 & 8
(Australian school years)

Name:

INSTRUCTIONS
• Do not open the CAT paper until told to do so.
• Maintain silence at all times.
• Do not bring mobile phones into the room.
• You may use calculators and printed language dictionaries.
• You may NOT borrow equipment without a supervisor’s permission.
• There are 9 questions. Questions 1–6 are multiple-choice with five possible answers given.
Questions 7–9 (each with three parts) require a three-digit answer. Attempt all questions.
Penalties do not apply.
• You are allowed working time of one hour (60 minutes). There is no extra reading time.
• This is a competition not a test; do not expect to answer all questions.
• Diagrams are NOT drawn to scale. They are intended only as aids.
• The questions have been thoroughly checked. Each question stands as written. No further
explanation of questions can be provided.
• You must not leave your seat. If you have any other questions or problems, please raise your
hand and wait for a supervisor.
• If you wish to leave the room a supervisor must accompany you.
• Record all your answers on the answer sheet provided.
• Use B or 2B lead pencils only. Ball point and ink pen markings may not activate the optical scanner.
• Do not make any other marks on the answer sheet as these may make the sheet unreadable.
• If you make an error, use a plastic eraser to completely remove all lead marks and smudges.
• Check the number of the answer you are filling in is the same as the number of the question
you are answering. This is particularly important if you decide to leave a question blank.
• To ensure the integrity of the CAT and to identify outstanding students, the AMT reserves
the right to re-examine students before deciding whether to grant official status to their score.
© 2017 AMT Publishing amtt limited acn 083 950 341
Computational and Algorithmic Thinking 2017 (Junior) 1

Part A: Questions 1–6

Each question should be answered by a single choice from A to E.
Questions are worth 3 points each.

1. Discarding
You have a line of cards, each with a digit on it. You can discard any number of cards,
keeping the rest in their original order.
For instance, given the line 4938, discarding the second and third cards would result in
the new number 48.

3 8
4 9 −→ 4 8

You start with the 11 cards 2 3 8 9 2 7 6 4 5 1 3 and want to make the largest possible
5-digit number.
What is the fourth digit of this new number?

(A) 2 (B) 3 (C) 4 (D) 5 (E) 6

2. Diamonds/Clubs
You have a line of cards consisting of diamonds on one side and clubs on the other. A
flip operation can be used to flip some cards starting from the left. For example, flip 3
flips the first 3 cards, as shown below.
♦ ♦ ♣ ♣ ♦ ♦ ♣ ♣ ♣
f lip 3
−→ ♣ ♣ ♦ ♣ ♦ ♦ ♣ ♣ ♣
What is the fewest number of flips required to make the line below consist of all dia-
monds?
♦ ♦ ♦ ♣ ♣ ♦ ♣ ♣ ♦ ♦ ♣ ♦ ♦ ♣

(A) 6 (B) 7 (C) 8 (D) 9 (E) 10

3. Swaps
What is the least number of swaps necessary to arrange these letters so that no adjacent
letters are the same?
BAAABBABBAAABABB
(Swaps do not have to be between adjacent letters. For instance, in the list A B C you
could swap the A with the C as well as the A with the B and the B with the C.)

(A) 3 (B) 4 (C) 5 (D) 6 (E) 7

Computational and Algorithmic Thinking 2017 (Junior) 2

4. Self-sorting Robots
At Julia’s Robot Factory, finished robots sort themselves into crates for delivery in the
following way.
There is a line of crates labelled from A to L in order from left to right.
Each robot is placed in front of crate A, the leftmost crate, and given a ‘sorting’ number.
The robot then follows these instructions in order.

1. If the sorting number is 1, enter the crate and stop.

2. If the sorting number is odd and greater than 1, move right to the next crate and
subtract 1 from the sorting number.

3. Divide the sorting number by 2.

4. Return to step 1 and continue.

A robot is given the sorting number 35. Into which crate does it sort itself?

(A) A (B) B (C) C (D) D (E) E

5. Family Tree
Jo is researching her family history and discovers that one of her ancestors, Captain
Twigg, was a merchant seaman who lived in the 17th century. She decides to research
all the direct descendants of Captain Twigg using the following filing system. All the
information on Captain Twigg is in folder 1. Inside the front cover of this folder, she
has a list of numbers (2,3,4,5) which are the folder numbers for each of the children of
the Captain in birth order. She uses a similar reference system to point to the children
of each person in the system. Then she makes a table so that she can quickly find
descendants. The table looks like this:
1 2, 3, 4, 5
2 6, 7
3 8
4
5 9, 10
6 11, 12
7 13, 14, 15
8 16
9 17, 18
10 19, 20, 21
11 22
How many great-grandchildren does Captain Twigg have?
(The great-children of Captain Twigg are the children of his grandchidren.)

(A) 6 (B) 8 (C) 11 (D) 12 (E) 22

Computational and Algorithmic Thinking 2017 (Junior) 3

6. Jumping Robot

A room is covered with dark and white floor tiles. A robot is  

restricted to the white tiles. It has two options available to it. In
  
a move it can slide horizontally or vertically as far or as little
as it wants before hitting a dark tile or the side of the room.  
Alternatively, its move can consist of a jump horizontally or  
vertically over a number of dark tiles. It cannot jump over white
tiles. The diagram to the right shows the possible cells the robot ×   
could reach from × in one move.
If the robot is on the tile marked × on the floor below, what is the minimum number of
moves that will be needed to reach any of the white tiles on the floor?

(A) 4 (B) 5 (C) 6 (D) 7 (E) 8

Computational and Algorithmic Thinking 2017 (Junior) 4

Part B: Questions 7–9

Each question has three parts, each of which is worth 2 points.
Each part should be answered by a number in the range 0–999.

7. Plates
You have several plates, each with a unique number. They are stacked one upon another
in some order. You must extract the plates exactly in the order 1, 2, ...
There is a second stack, initially empty, that you can use to store plates temporarily.
At any time, you can take either of the following actions:

• Move: Take the top plate of either stack and put it on the top of the other stack.

• Extract: Remove the top plate from one of the stacks.

Suppose you have two plates, numbered 1 and 2, with plate 2 on top of plate 1. The
diagram below shows how three actions, one move and two extracts, are enough to
extract both plates in the order 1, 2.

2
1 Move 2 1 Extract 2 Extract
→ → →

For each of the stacks below, what is the fewest number of actions you need to make to
extract all the plates in order 1, 2, ...
A. 4 B. 1 C. 6
3 3 5
1 5 3
5 6 1
2 4 4
2 9
8
2
7
Computational and Algorithmic Thinking 2017 (Junior) 5

8. Ski Run
In the ski runs below, the numbers on each leg indicate the increase in speed you will
get when you ski the leg. Unfortunately some legs (denoted by double wiggly lines) are
slushy and you lose half of your speed. Your speed at the top of the run is 0.
For each of the ski runs below, what is your greatest possible speed at the bottom?
(T means top, B means bottom.)

A.
6
4 2
T 6 B
4 1
6 4

B.
2
1
2 2
3 4
4 1
T B
6 2
4 2
2
6

C.
7

4 4 7 4
4 4
T B
2 4 1 2
1
Computational and Algorithmic Thinking 2017 (Junior) 6

9. Hopping
You are playing a game where you have to move along a line of squares from left to
right. You can step to the adjacent square, or hop over it to the next one.
Each square has a number in it. If you step onto a square from the adjacent square, you
get that number of points. If you hop over a square, you get double the points of the
square you land on, but miss out on the points in the square you hop over. You may hop
over the last square.
Consider the squares below.

S 4 2 3

Starting from S to the left of the squares, you would get 9 points by stepping onto all
squares, 7 by hopping over the first square, 10 by hopping over the second square, 6 by
hopping over the third square, and 4 by hopping over the first and third squares.
Each list below represents numbers in a row of squares. Your aim is to collect the
smallest possible number of points.
For each, what is the smallest total you could collect following the rules given above?

A. 5 2 4 3 6 4

B. 5 2 4 3 6 4 5 2

C. 3 4 5 4 3 2 3 4 5 2