2011 AIME II Problem 7

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7.

Ed has five identical green marbles, and a large supply of identical red marbles. He arranges the green marbles and some of the red ones in a row and finds that the number of marbles whose right hand neighbor is the same color as themselves equals the number of marbles whose right hand neighbor is the other color. An example of such an arrangement is GGRRRGGRG. Let mm be the maximum number of red marbles for which such an arrangement is possible, and let NN be the number of ways in which Ed can arrange the m+5m + 5 marbles to satisfy the requirement. Find the remainder when NN is divided by 1000.1000.

Answer: 3
Concepts:arrangements with restrictionspartitions and compositionsstars and bars
Difficulty rating: 2710
Solution:

Break the row into maximal single-color runs. If there are kk runs, there are exactly k1k - 1 different-color neighbor pairs. Since runs alternate colors and the five green marbles form at most 55 runs, there are at most 66 red runs, hence at most 1111 runs and at most 1010 different-color pairs. With nn red marbles there are n+4n + 4 neighbor pairs in all, and the requirement says half of them are different-color pairs, so n+420,n + 4 \le 20, i.e. n16.n \le 16. Thus m=16.m = 16.

With 1616 reds and 2121 marbles, the count of different-color pairs must be exactly 10,10, so there are exactly 1111 runs: the colors must alternate as red–green–red–\cdots–red with 66 red runs and 55 single green marbles between them. The arrangements correspond to compositions of 1616 into 66 positive parts, of which there are (155)=3003.\binom{15}{5} = 3003.

Hence N=3003,N = 3003, and the remainder upon division by 10001000 is 3.3.

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