INMO Basics GAME

1 A pirate ship has 2009 treasure chests (all chests are closed). Each chest contains some amount of
gold. To distribute the gold the pirates are going to do the following. The captain is going to decide
first how many chests he wants to keep and tell that number to the rest of the pirates. Then he is
going to open all the chests and decide which ones he wants to keep (he can only choose as many as
he said before opening them). The captain wants to make sure he can keep at least half of the total
gold. However, he wants to say the smallest possible number to keep the rest of pirates as happy as
he can. What number should the captain say?
Note: The chests may be empty.

Solution:
Note that the chests could all contain the same amount of gold, so to keep at least of half of the gold
the captain should keep at least half of the chests. With this in mind, the number he must say is at least
1005. Let us see that regardless of the gold distribution, 1005 of the chests are enough to keep half of
the gold. To do this it is enough to open the chests and order them according to the amount of gold
they have a1 ≥ a2 ≥ a3 ≥ ... ≥ a2009. If the captain keeps the chests a1, a2,.....,a1005 then he has at least half
of the gold.

2 A pirate ship has 2009 treasure chests (all chests are closed). Each chest contains some amount of
gold and some amount of silver. To distribute the gold and silver the pirates are going to do the
following. The captain is going to decide first how many chests he wants to keep and tell that
number to the rest of the pirates. Then he is going to open all the chests and decide which ones he
wants to keep. The captain wants to make sure he can keep at least half of the total gold and haf of
the total silver. However, he wants to say the smallest possible number to keep the rest of the
pirates as happy as he can. What number should the captain say?
Note: The amount of gold and silver in each chest may be different.

Solution:
Since the captain wants to keep at least half of the gold, he needs again at least 1005 chests. It turns
out that 1005 is also enough in this case. To see this, let us order again the chests according to their
amount of gold a1 ≥ a2 ≥ … ≥ a2009. The choice of the captain is as follows. First he splits the chests
into the following groups: {a1}, {a2, a3} {a4, a5}, .... ,{a2008, a2009}. From each group he picks the one
that has more silver. By doing this he guarantees he keeps half of the total amount of silver. However,
in each group the chest he did not choose has at most the same amount of gold as the chest he chose
from the previous group. Thus he also has at least half of the total amount of gold

3 On an m × n board a path is a sequence of squares such that any two consecutive square share one
side. Show that on an m × n board there is a path that starts and ends in the same square and goes
 through every other square exactly once if and only if at least one of m, n is even and both are
greater than or equal to two.
Note: In this problem, if m = n = 1, we do not consider the single square as a valid path.

Solution:
Note that if any of m or n is 1 we cannot construct the path. We are going to use the chessboard
coloring. Two consecutive squares have different color.. In a closed path there must be the same
number of black and white squares. Thus if there is a closed path that uses all the squares once, the
total number of white squares and the total number of black squares must be equal. Thus the number
of squares is even, as we wanted.
Here is a path for a 6 × 7 board. This construction can clearly be extended if one of the side sizes is
even and both are at least 2.

4 On a 1 × 2000 board, A and B play by turns to write S or O in each square. The first one to write the
word SOS in three consecutive squares wins. If A plays first, show that B has a winning strategy.

Solution:
In his first turn B places an S far away from the first letter of A and the edges (at least 6 square of
distance from each). If he cannot win in his second turn, he places an S three squares away from his
previous S, but without giving A the chance to make an S O S. This is always possible, because B has
two places where he can write the second S, and the second letter of A can only be near one of them.
Thus we have two square with S separated by two empty spaces. If any players writes anything in
those two squares the other can win, so the game cannot end in a draw.
After this, the strategy for B is a follows. If he can make as S O S, he does and winds. If not, he
searches for a square that has both its neighbors occupied or both its neighbors free, and writes an O
there. If he could not find the square it means that every empty square has exactly one empty square as
a neighbor. That is, there is an even number of empty square. This can never happen in B’s turn, since
thy must have played an odd number of times before him
Note that by playing like this A cannot win. This is because since B could not make an S O S in his
turn, A could need to use the letter B just wrote to win. However, they way B chooses to write his O
makes that impossible. Thus B has winning strategy.

5 On a table there are 100 coins. A and B are going to remove coins from the table by turns. In each turn
they can remove 2, 5 or 6 coins. The first one that cannot make a move loses. Determine who has a
winning strategy if A plays first.
Solution:
We will see that the set of losing positions is the set of number congruent to 0, 1, 4, 8 modulo 11. If
A is in a losing position and removes 5 or 6 coins, B can remove 6 or 5 coins, respectively. The only
way that this is impossible for B is if there are less coins than those needed to return A to the losing
position it was in (there should be less that 11 coins in A’ s turn). The only case is if there are
exactly 8 coins left, so B can remove 2 coins and win. If A removes 2 coins, there are several cases.
If A was in 1, B removes 6. If A was in 0, B removes 5. If A was in 4, B removes 2. If A was in 8, B
removes 5. Since 100 is congruent to 1 modulo 11, A loses.