MathDB
Playing with balls in boxes

Source: Bulgaria JBMO TST 2023, Day 2, Problem 3

June 17, 2023
combinatoricsinvariant

Problem Statement

There are infinitely many boxes - initially one of them contains nn balls and all others are empty. On a single move we take some balls from a non-empty box and put them into an empty box and on a sheet of paper we write down the product of the resulting amount of balls in the two boxes. After some moves, the sum of all numbers on the sheet of paper became 20232023. What is the smallest possible value of nn?