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AMC Lecture 6

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AMC Lecture 6

note 6

Uploaded by

quangetc3
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LECTURE 6

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 6:27 AM

BASIC COUNTING TECHNIQUES


We will introduce several different methods of attacking counting
problems:
1) CASE WORK ( breaking up a problem into two or more exclusive
cases)
2) COMPLEMENTARY COUNTING (counting what we don't want
than what we want)
3) Constructive counting (counting the number of items by
counting the ways that we can built the item's parts)

Knowing which counting method to use is a bit of an art form, and takes lots of practice. Often multiple methods will work, but
usually one method is substantially easier for a particular problem.

1. CASE WORK:

Example 1: The figure to the right represents a road map between 4


villages, labelled A, B,C, and D. The arcs indicate paths between the
various villages. How many ways are there to go from A to D along the
paths, if you can only move left to right? (For example, you can't go
ABABACD; you can only go ACD or ABD)

Solution: We have two general options:


We can go through B or through C. We must go through one of them
(can't go through both). We say that these two choices are exclusive,
because we must choose one or the other, but not both.

Case 1: Go from A to D through B

Case 2: Go from A to D through C

To count the number of ways to get from A to D, we now add the


number of ways from each of our cases.

REMARK: When faced with a series of independent choices, one after


the other, we multiply the number of options at each step. When
faced with exclusive options (meaning we can't choose more than one),

AMC 8 TRI PHAN Page 1


faced with exclusive options (meaning we can't choose more than one),
we add the number of options.

Example: How many pairs of positive integers (m; n) satisfy m^2 + n


< 222

Solution:

Case 1: m =1

Case 2: m =2

Case 3: m=3

Case 4: m=4

Example: The inhabitants of the island of Mumble decided to expand their alphabet
to the standard Roman alphabet (26 letters, A through Z). But they still limit their
words to 3 letters or less, and for some reason. They insist that all words contain
the letter A at least once. How many 3-letter words are possible?

Case 1: Words which contain exactly one A


Subcase 1.1 : words of the form

Subcase 1.2:

Subcase 1.3:

Case 2: Words which contain exactly two A's

AMC 8 TRI PHAN Page 2


Case 3: Words which contain exactly three A's

2. COMPLEMENTARY COUNTING

The term complementary counting refers to the general technique of counting


what we DON'T want to count. This is often much easier than counting what we
actually want to count.

Let's go back to the previous problem, and see a simpler way to do it.

Example: The inhabitants of the island of Mumble decided to expand their


alphabet to the standard Roman alphabet (26 letters, A through Z). But they still
limit their words to 3 letters or less, and for some reason. They insist that all
words contain the letter A at least once. How many 3-letter words are possible?

Solution : Let's count the number of 3-letter words which don't have an A, and
subtract this total from the number of all 3-letter words, to get the number of 3-
letter words with at least one A.

How many 3-letters words don't have an A?

How many 3-letters words are there with no restrictions?

The number of 3-letter words with at least one A = (3-letter words) - (2-letters
words with no A's) = ……

Example: How many three-digit numbers are not multiples of 7?

AMC 8 TRI PHAN Page 3


Example: The Smith family has 4 sons and 3 daughters. In how many ways can
they be seated in a row of 7 chairs such that at least 2 boys are next to each
other?

Hint: There is only one way to assign genders to the seating so that no two boys
are next to each other, that is BGBGBGB.

AMC 8 TRI PHAN Page 4


3. CONSTRUCTIVE COUNTING
Often we are faced with problems in which it is not clear how to count the items
directly, but if we think about how we construct the items that we are trying to
count, we can see a way to count them. This general idea is called constructive
counting

Example: How many sequence x_1, x_2, x_3, …,x_7 can be formed in which all the
x_i are integers greater than 0 and less than 6, and no two adjacent x_i are equal.

This is a fairly hard problem to attack using casework or complementary counting.

Counting 7-number sequences in which there are adjacent x_i that are equal is not
easy task to tackle directly.

Instead, we think about how we might construct such a sequence

How many choices for the first number x_1:

Regardless of what we have chosen, how many choices for the second number x_
2:

Similarly…….

AMC 8 TRI PHAN Page 5

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