Problems
A New Year’s garland, hanging along the school corridor, consists of red and blue light bulbs. Next to each red light bulb there must necessarily be a blue one. What is the largest number of red light bulbs in this garland, if it consists of only 50 light bulbs?
Looking back at her diary, Natasha noticed that in the date 17/02/2008 the sum of the first four numbers are equal to the sum of the last four. When will this coincidence happen for the last time in 2008?
A cinema contains 7 rows each with 10 seats. A group of 50 children went to see the morning screening of a film, and returned for the evening screening. Prove that there will be two children who sat in the same row for both the morning and the evening screening.
A magician with a blindfold gives a spectator five cards with the numbers from 1 to 5 written on them. The spectator hides two cards, and gives the other three to the assistant magician. The assistant indicates to the spectator two of them, and the spectator then calls out the numbers of these cards to the magician (in the order in which he wants). After that, the magician guesses the numbers of the cards hidden by the spectator. How can the magician and the assistant make sure that the trick always works?
In 10 boxes there are pencils (there are no empty boxes). It is known that in different boxes there is a different number of pencils, and in each box, all pencils are of different colors. Prove that from each box you can choose a pencil so that they will all be of different colors.
100 queens, that cannot capture each other, are placed on a \(100 \times 100\) chessboard. Prove that at least one queen is in each \(50 \times 50\) corner square.
In Neverland, only elves and gnomes live. Gnomes lie about their gold, but in any other instances they tell the truth. Elves lie when talking about gnomes, but in other instances they tell the truth. One day two neverlandians said:
\(A\): All my gold I stole from the Dragon.
\(B\): You’re lying.
Determine whether each of them is an elf or a gnome.
Hannah has a calculator that allows you to multiply a number by 3, add 3 to the number or (4 if the number is divisible by 3 to make a whole number) divide by 3. How can the number 11 be made on this calculator from the number 1?
A game of ’Battleships’ has a fleet consisting of one \(1\times 4\) square, two \(1\times 3\) squares, three \(1\times 2\) squares, and four \(1\times 1\) squares. It is easy to distribute the fleet of ships on a \(10\times 10\) board, see the example below. What is the smallest square board on which this fleet can be placed? Note that by the rules of the game, no two ships can be placed on horizontally, vertically, or diagonally adjacent squares.
In the \(4 \times 4\) square, the cells in the left half are painted black, and the rest – in white. In one go, it is allowed to repaint all cells inside any rectangle in the opposite colour. How, in three goes, can one repaint the cells to get the board to look like a chessboard?