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Baltic Way shortlist

Baltic Way counting and probability

Problem

Let , , be two sequences of positive integers with two exceptions: , . Several villages are connected by roads, each road connects two villages which are called neighbours and has length km. Roads do not intersect each other, but can pass over/under each other. The distance between two villages and is the length of the shortest path between them. In this country the maximal distance between two villages equals km and for every pair of villages (the case is allowed) the following condition holds: if distance between and is km, then there are exactly (, respectively) neighbours of that are km further from (closer to, respectively) than . Show that the number is an integer.
Solution
Let be an arbitrary village, be the set of villages at distance from , and be the number of elements in . Then the sequence does not depend on ! We prove this statement by induction on . We will show also that . Clearly, . This is the base of induction. To prove the step of induction we count roads between and in two ways: we can choose the village in and the road to by ways; from the other hand we can choose the village in and the road to by ways. Therefore . The problem statement follows immediately from this formula.

Techniques

Counting two waysInduction / smoothing