Problems

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There are a thousand tickets with numbers 000, 001, ..., 999 and a hundred boxes with the numbers 00, 01, ..., 99. A ticket is allowed to be dropped into a box if the number of the box can be obtained from the ticket number by erasing one of the digits. Is it possible to arrange all of the tickets into 50 boxes?

a) In a group of 4 people, who speak different languages, any three of them can communicate with one another; perhaps by one translating for two others. Prove that it is always possible to split them into pairs so that the two members of every pair have a common language.

b) The same, but for a group of 100 people.

c) The same, but for a group of 102 people.

Two people toss a coin: one tosses it 10 times, the other – 11 times. What is the probability that the second person’s coin showed heads more times than the first?

In a square which has sides of length 1 there are 100 figures, the total area of which sums to more than 99. Prove that in the square there is a point which belongs to all of these figures.

The key of the cipher, called the “swivelling grid”, is a stencil made from a square sheet of chequered paper of size \(n \times n\) (where \(n\) is even). Some of the cells are cut out. One side of the stencil is marked. When this stencil is placed onto a blank sheet of paper in four possible ways (marked side up, right, down or left), its cut-outs completely cover the entire area of the square, where each cell is found under the cut-out exactly once. The letters of the message, that have length \(n^2\), are successively written into the cut-outs of the stencil, where the sheet of paper is placed on a blank sheet of paper with the marked side up. After filling in all of the cut-outs of the stencil with the letters of the message, the stencil is placed in the next position, etc. After removing the stencil from the sheet of paper, there is an encrypted message.

Find the number of different keys for an arbitrary even number \(n\).

26 numbers are chosen from the numbers 1, 2, 3, ..., 49, 50. Will there always be two numbers chosen whose difference is 1?

We are given 51 two-digit numbers – we will count one-digit numbers as two-digit numbers with a leading 0. Prove that it is possible to choose 6 of these so that no two of them have the same digit in the same column.