CombinatoricsDifficulty 5.3AIME, harderFind the answer
Eight points are chosen on the circumference of a circle, labelled P1,P2,…,P8 in clockwise order. A route is a sequence of at least two points Pa1,Pa2,…,Pan such that if an ant were to visit these points in their given order, starting at Pa1 and ending at Pan, by following n−1 straight line segments (each connecting each Pai and Pai+1 ), it would never visit a point twice or cross its own path. Find the number of routes.
A number or a short expression. Fractions can be typed as 3/2, and spacing doesn't matter.
Solution
Solution 1: How many routes are there if we are restricted to n available points, and we must use all n of them? The answer is n2n−2 : first choose the starting point, then each move after that must visit one of the two neighbors of your expanding region of visited points (doing anything else would prevent you from visiting every point). Now simply sum over all possible sets of points that you end up visiting: (88)(8⋅26)+(78)(7⋅25)+⋯+(28)(2⋅20)=8744. Solution 2: We use recursion. Let f(n) be the answer for n points, with the condition that our path must start at Pn (so our final answer is 8f(8) ). Then f(1)=0 and f(2)=1. Now suppose n≥3 and suppose the second point we visit is Pi(1≤i<n). Then we can either stop the path there, yielding one possibility. Alternatively, we can continue the path. In this case, note that it may never again cross the chord PiPn. If the remainder of the path is among the points P1,…,Pi, there are f(i) possible routes. Otherwise, there are f(n−i) possible routes. As a result, f(n)=i=1∑n−11+f(i)+f(n−i)=(n−1)+2i=1∑n−1f(i) From here we may compute: n 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 f(n) 0 1 4 13 40 121 364 1093 Therefore the answer is 8⋅1093=8744.
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