Balkan Mathematical Olympiad 2018 p3
Source: BMO 2018
May 9, 2018
conicscombinatorics
Problem Statement
Alice and Bob play the following game: They start with non-empty piles of coins. Taking turns, with Alice playing first, each player choose a pile with an even number of coins and moves half of the coins of this pile to the other pile. The game ends if a player cannot move, in which case the other player wins.Determine all pairs of positive integers such that if initially the two piles have and coins respectively, then Bob has a winning strategy.Proposed by Dimitris Christophides, Cyprus