Problems

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Three friends decide, by a coin toss, who goes to get the juice. They have one coin. How do they arrange coin tosses so that all of them have equal chances to not have to go and get the juice?

There are 8 glasses of water on the table. You are allowed to take any two of the glasses and make them have equal volumes of water (by pouring some water from one glass into the other). Prove that, by using such operations, you can eventually get all the glasses to contain equal volumes of water.

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

A broken calculator carries out only one operation “asterisk”: \(a*b = 1 - a/b\). Prove that using this calculator it is possible to carry out all four arithmetic operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division).

There are 20 students in a class, and each one is friends with at least 14 others. Can you prove that there are four students in this class who are all friends?

Each of the three axes has one rotating pin and a fixed arrow. The gears are connected in series. On the first gear there are 33 teeth, on the second – 10, on the third – 7. On each tooth of the first gear one symbol or letter of the following string of letters and symbols is written in the clockwise direction in the following order:

A B V C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U W X Y Z ! ? \(>\) \(<\) $ £ €

On the teeth of the second and third gears in increasing order the numbers 0 to 9 and 0 to 6 are written respectively in a clockwise direction. When the arrow of the first axis points to a letter, the arrows of the other two axes point to numbers.

The letters and symbols of the message are encrypted in sequence. Encryption is performed by rotating the first gear anti-clockwise until the first possible letter or symbol that can be encrypted is landed on by the arrow. At this point, the numbers indicated by the second and third arrows are consistently written out. At the beginning of the encryption, the 1st wheel points to the letter A, and the arrows of the 2nd and 3rd wheels to the number 0.

Encrypt the Slavic name OLIMPIADA.

A convex polygon on a plane contains no fewer than \(m^2+1\) points with whole number co-ordinates. Prove that within the polygon there are \(m+1\) points with whole number co-ordinates that lie on a single straight line.

All the points on the edge of a circle are coloured in two different colours at random. Prove that there will be an equilateral triangle with vertices of the same colour inside the circle – the vertices are points on the circumference of the circle.

A message is encrypted using numbers where each number corresponds to a different letter of the alphabet. Decipher the following encoded text:

1317247191772413816720713813920257178

A message is encrypted by replacing the letters of the source text with pairs of digits according to some table (known only to the sender and receiver) in which different letters of the alphabet correspond to different pairs of digits. The cryptographer was given the task to restore the encrypted text. In which case will it be easier for him to perform the task: if it is known that the first word of the second line is a “thermometer” or that the first word of the third line is “smother”? Justify your answer. (It is assumed that the cryptographic table is not known).