Problems

In an \(n \times n\) board the squares are painted black or white in some way. Three of the squares in the corners are white and one is black. Show that there is a \(2\times 2\) square with an odd number of white unit squares.

On an \(8\times 8\) board there is a lamp in every square. Initially every lamp is turned off. In a move we choose a lamp and a direction (it can be the vertical direction or the horizontal one) and change the state of that lamp and all its neighbours in that direction. After a certain number of moves, there is exactly one lamp turned on. Find all the possible positions of that lamp.

In an \(5\times 5\) board one corner was removed. Is it possible to cover the remaining board with linear trominos (\(1\times 3\) blocks)?

Is it possible to cover a \(6 \times 6\) board with the \(L\)-tetraminos without overlapping? The pieces can be flipped and turned.

Is it possible to cover a \((4n+2) \times (4n+2)\) board with the \(L\)-tetraminos without overlapping for any \(n\)? The pieces can be flipped and turned.

Is it possible to cover a \(4n \times 4n\) board with the \(L\)-tetraminos without overlapping for any \(n\)? The pieces can be flipped and turned.

In an \(n\times n\) table, two opposite corner squares are black and the rest are white. We wish to turn the whole \(n\times n\) table black in two stages. In the first stage, we paint black some of the squares that are white at the moment. In the second stage, we can perform the following two operations as much as we like. The row operation is to swap the colours of all the squares in a particular row. The column operation is to swap the colours of all the squares in a particular column. What is the fewest number of white squares that we can paint in the first stage?

An example of the row operation: let W stand for white and B stand for black and suppose that \(n=5\). Also suppose that a particular row has the colours WWBWB. Then performing the row operation would change this row to BBWBW.

A family is going on a big holiday, visiting Austria, Bulgaria, Cyprus, Denmark and Estonia. They want to go to Estonia before Bulgaria. How many ways can they visit the five countries, subject to this constraint?

How many subsets of \(\{1,2,...,n\}\) (that is, the integers from \(1\) to \(n\)) have an even product? For the purposes of this question, take the product of the numbers in the empty set to be \(1\).

How many subsets are there of \(\{1,2,...,n\}\) (the integers from \(1\) to \(n\) inclusive) containing no consecutive digits? That is, we do count \(\{1,3,6,8\}\) but do not count \(\{1,3,6,7\}\).
For example, when \(n=3\), we have \(8\) subsets overall but only \(5\) contain no consecutive integers. The \(8\) subsets are \(\varnothing\) (the empty set), \(\{1\}\), \(\{2\}\), \(\{3\}\), \(\{1,3\}\), \(\{1,2\}\), \(\{2,3\}\) and \(\{1,2,3\}\), but we exclude the final three of these