A tennis tournament takes place in a sports club. The rules of this tournament are as follows. The loser of the tennis match is eliminated (there are no draws in tennis). The pair of players for the next match is determined by a coin toss. The first match is judged by an external judge, and every other match must be judged by a member of the club who did not participate in the match and did not judge earlier. Could it be that there is no one to judge the next match?
10 children were each given a bowl with 100 pieces of pasta. However, these children did not want to eat and instead started to play. One of the children started to place one piece of pasta into every other child’s bowl. What is the least amount of transfers needed so that everyone has a different number of pieces of pasta in their bowl?
A pharmacist has three weights, with which he measured out and gave 100 g of iodine to one buyer, 101 g of honey to another, and 102 g of hydrogen peroxide to the third. He always placed the weights on one side of the scales, and the goods on the other. Could it be that each weight used is lighter than 90 grams?
Once upon a time there were twenty spies. Each of them wrote an accusation against ten of his colleagues. Prove that at least ten pairs of spies have told on each other.
Fred chose 2017 (not necessarily different) natural numbers \(a_1, a_2, \dots , a_{2017}\) and plays by himself in the following game. Initially, he has an unlimited supply of stones and 2017 large empty boxes. In one move Fred adds a1 stones to any box (at his choice), in any of the remaining boxes (of his choice) – \(a_2\) stones, ..., finally, in the remaining box – \(a_{2017}\) stones. His purpose is to ensure that eventually all the boxes have an equal number of stones. Could he have chosen the numbers so that the goal could be achieved in 43 moves, but is impossible for a smaller non-zero number of moves?
Gary drew an empty table of \(50 \times 50\) and wrote on top of each column and to the left of each row a number. It turned out that all 100 written numbers are different, and 50 of them are rational, and the remaining 50 are irrational. Then, in each cell of the table, he wrote down a product of numbers written at the top of its column and to the left of the row (the “multiplication table”). What is the largest number of products in this table which could be rational numbers?
There is an elastic band and glass beads: four identical red ones, two identical blue ones and two identical green ones. It is necessary to string all eight beads on the elastic band in order to get a bracelet. How many different bracelets can be made so that beads of the same colour are not next to each other? (Assume that there is no buckle, and the knot on the elastic is invisible).
To test a new program, a computer selects a random real number \(A\) from the interval \([1, 2]\) and makes the program solve the equation \(3x + A = 0\). Find the probability that the root of this equation is less than \(0.4\).
In a shopping centre, three machines sell coffee. During the day, the first machine can break down with a probability of 0.4 and the second with a probability of 0.3. Every evening, Mr Ivanov, the mechanic, comes and repairs all of the broken-down coffee machines. One day, Ivanov wrote, in his report, that the mathematical expectation of breakdowns during one week is 12. Prove that Mr Ivanov is exaggerating.
The television game “What? Where? When?” consists of a team of “experts” trying to solve 13 questions (or sectors), numbered from 1 to 13, that are thought up and sent in by the viewers of the programme. Envelopes with the questions are selected in turn in random order with the help of a spinning top with an arrow. If this sector has already come up previously, and the envelope is no longer there, then the next clockwise sector is played. If it is also empty, then the next one is played, etc., until there is a non-empty sector.
Before the break, the players played six sectors.
a) What is more likely: that sector number 1 has already been played or that sector number 8 has already been plated?
b) Find the probability that, before the break, six sectors with numbers from 1 to 6 were played consecutively.