Problems

Age
Difficulty
Found: 2012

There are 101 buttons of 11 different colours. Prove that amongst them there are either 11 buttons of the same colour, or 11 buttons of different colours.

A journalist came to a company which had \(N\) people. He knows that this company has a person \(Z\), who knows all the other members of the company, but nobody knows him. A journalist can address each member of the company with the question: “Do you know such and such?” Find the smallest number of questions sufficient to surely find \(Z\). (Everyone answers the questions truthfully. One person can be asked more than one question.)

Arrows are placed on the sides of a polygon. Prove that the number of vertices in which two arrows converge is equal to the number of vertices from which two arrows emerge.

In the government of the planet of liars and truth tellers there are \(101\) ministers. In order to reduce the budget, it was decided to reduce the number of ministers by \(1.\) But each of the ministers said that if they were to be removed from the government, then the majority of the remaining ministers would be liars. How many truth tellers and how many liars are there in the government?

Is it possible to fill an \(n\times n\) table with the numbers \(-1\), \(0\), \(1\), such that the sums of all the rows, columns, and diagonals are unique?

Prove that in any group of friends there will be two people who have the same number of friends.

Of 11 balls, 2 are radioactive. For any set of balls in one check, you can find out if there is at least one radioactive ball in it (but you cannot tell how many of them are radioactive). Is it possible to find both radioactive balls in 7 checks?

In chess, ‘check’ is when the king is under threat of capture from another piece. What is the largest number of kings that it is possible to place on a standard \(8\times 8\) chess board so that no two check one another.