What is the highest possible point number
Source: AIMO 6, German Pre-TST 2009
July 16, 2011
combinatorics unsolvedcombinatorics
Problem Statement
The 16 fields of a checker board can be arranged in 18 lines as follows: the four lines, the four columns, the five diagonals from north west to south east and the five diagonals from north east to south west. These diagonals consists of 2,3 or 4 edge-adjacent fields of same colour; the corner fields of the chess board alone do not form a diagonal. Now, we put a token in 10 of the 16 fields. Each of the 18 lines contains an even number of tokens contains a point. What is the highest possible point number when can be achieved by optimal placing of the 10 tokens. Explain your answer.