When 200 sweets are randomly distributed to a class of schoolchildren, there will always be at least two children who receive the same number of sweets or even no sweets at all. What is the minimum number of children in this class?
A mix of boys and girls are standing in a circle. There are 20 children in total. It is known that each boys’ neighbour in the clockwise direction is a child wearing a blue T-shirt, and that each girls’ neighbour in the anticlockwise direction is a child wearing a red T-shirt. Is it possible to uniquely determine how many boys there are in the circle?
In a \(10 \times 10\) square, all of the cells of the upper left \(5 \times 5\) square are painted black and the rest of the cells are painted white. What is the largest number of polygons that can be cut from this square (on the boundaries of the cells) so that in every polygon there would be three times as many white cells than black cells? (Polygons do not have to be equal in shape or size.)
A firm recorded its expenses in pounds for 100 items, creating a list of 100 numbers (with each number having no more than two decimal places). Each accountant took a copy of the list and found an approximate amount of expenses, acting as follows. At first, he arbitrarily chose two numbers from the list, added them, discarded the sum after the decimal point (if there was anything) and recorded the result instead of the selected two numbers. With the resulting list of 99 numbers, he did the same, and so on, until there was one whole number left in the list. It turned out that in the end all the accountants ended up with different results. What is the largest number of accountants that could work in the company?
An abstract artist took a wooden \(5\times 5\times 5\) cube and divided each face into unit squares. He painted each square in one of three colours – black, white, and red – so that there were no horizontally or vertically adjacent squares of the same colour. What is the smallest possible number of squares the artist could have painted black following this rule? Unit squares which share a side are considered adjacent both when the squares lie on the same face and when they lie on adjacent faces.
A cubic polynomial \(f (x)\) is given. Let’s find a group of three different numbers \((a, b, c)\) such that \(f (a)= b\), \(f (b) = c\) and \(f (c) = a\). It is known that there were eight such groups \([a_i, b_i, c_i]\), \(i = 1, 2, \dots , 8\), which contains 24 different numbers. Prove that among eight numbers of the form \(a_i + b_i + c_i\) at least three are different.
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?
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?