We put, forming a circumference of a circle, 2004 bicolored files: white on one side of the file and black on the other. A movement consists in choosing a file with the black side upwards and flipping three files: the one chosen, the one to its right, and the one to its left. Suppose that initially there was only one file with its black side upwards. Is it possible, repeating the movement previously described, to get all of the files to have their white sides upwards? And if we were to have 2003 files, between which exactly one file began with the black side upwards?
circlespatternnumber theory