Problems

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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.

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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.

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There are \(100\) people standing in line, and one of them is Arthur. Everyone in the line is either a knight, who always tells the truth, or a liar who always lies. Everyone except Arthur said, "There are exactly two liars between Arthur and me." How many liars are there in this line, if it is known that Arthur is a knight?

There is a scout group where some of the members know each other. Amongst any four members there is at least one of them who knows the other three. Prove that there is at least one member who knows the entirety of the scout group.

We wish to paint the \(15\) segments in the picture below in three colours. We want it such that no two segments of the same colour have a common end. For example, you cannot have both \(AB\) and \(BC\) blue since they share the end \(B\). Is such a painting possible?

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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

In the following grid, how many different ways are there of getting from the bottom left triangle to the bottom right triangle? You must only go from between triangles that share an edge and you can visit each triangle at most once. (You don’t have to visit all of the triangles.)

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