Problem Solving in Combinatorics and Logic

1. How many different ways can 5 people sit down in a 5-seat balcony in the opera house,
so that at least one person sits where his/her ticket suggests?

2. How many different ways can you go from one vertex of a cube to the other vertex,
which is the farthest away from this, through the edges of the cube if you can visit every
vertex no more than once?

3. 0, 01, 0110, 01101001, 0110100110010110, ...

In this sequence you can get the next element if you connect the complementer of the
previous element to that previous element. (You get the complementer of an element by
switching the zeros and the 1's in it.) The 12th element of this sequence has 2048 digits.
What digit is on the 1999th place in that element?

4. A black-white board 12x12 is painted like a chess board. In a step one can repaint any
two side by side squares: black into green, green into white, white into black. What is the
minimum number of steps needed to repaint the board into the "opposite" white-black
board?

5. Two people play a game. They put 3 piles of matches on the table: the first one
contains 2 matches, the second one 3 matches, and the third one 4 matches. Then they
take turns making moves. In a move, a player may take any nonzero number of matches
FROM ONE PILE. The player who takes the last match from the table loses the game.
(a) The player who makes the first move can win the game. What is the winning first
move?
(b) How can he win? (Describe his strategy.)

6. At customer request, the pizza shop has agreed to fill orders with different choices for
each half of a pizza. Remember that they offer a cheese pizza with tomato sauce. A
customer can then select from the following toppings: peppers, sausage, mushroom, and
pepperoni. There is a choice of crusts: regular (thin) and Sicilian (thick). How many
different choices for pizza does a customer have?
7. A computer responds to the following six commands:
1) Let the starting value of X be 3, and the starting value of S be 0.
2) Increase the value of X by 2.
3) Increase The value of S by X.
4) If S is at least 10 000, then complete the 5th command, otherwise go back to the 2nd
command.
5) Print the value of X.
6) Stop
What will the computer print out?

8. There are 100 black and 100 white balls in a box. We take out three balls randomly,
and depending on the colors of those balls we put back some balls following the
instructions on the chart below. Somebody keeps on doing this until only two balls
remain in the box. The person does not tell us anything about how the process went. Now
we have to take one ball out of the box, but before that we have to predict the color of
this ball. What color should we predict?

9. At a recent birthday party there were four mothers and their children. aged 1, 2, 3 and
4. From the clues below can you work out whose child is whose and their relevant ages?
It was Jane's child's birthday party. Brian is not the oldest child. Sarah had Anne just over
a year ago. Laura's child will be 3 next birthday. Daniel is older than Charlie. Teresa's
child is the oldest. Charlie is older than Laura's child.

10. In my collection of classical music I have a range of pieces which last 6, 7, 8 and 9
minutes.
The piece by Bach lasts 8 minutes and the CD lasts longer than the piece by Holst. The
piece on DAT tape is longer than the piece by Beethoven. The single lasts for 7 minutes
and the album does not contain any Holst. The piece by Butler is on the DAT tape.
Can you determine which piece of music is on which format and how long each lasts?

11. There are three people (Alex, Brook and Cody), one of whom is a knight, one a
knave, and one a spy.
The knight always tells the truth, the knave always lies, and the spy can either lie or tell
the truth.
Alex says: "Cody is a knave."
Brook says: "Alex is a knight."
Cody says: "I am the spy."
Who is the knight, who the knave, and who the spy?