1993 AIME Problems/Problem 12
Problem
The vertices of are
,
, and
. The six faces of a die are labeled with two
's, two
's, and two
's. Point
is chosen in the interior of
, and points
,
,
are generated by rolling the die repeatedly and applying the rule: If the die shows label
, where
, and
is the most recently obtained point, then
is the midpoint of
. Given that
, what is
?
Solution
Solution 1
If we have points and
and we want to find
so
is the midpoint of
and
, then
and
. So we start with the point they gave us and work backwards. We make sure all the coordinates stay within the triangle. We have
Then
, so
and
, and we get
So the answer is .
Solution 2
Let be the
roll that directly influences
.
Note that .
Then quickly checking each addend from the right to the left, we have the following information (remembering that if a point must be , we can just ignore it!):
for , since all addends are nonnegative, a non-
value will result in a
or
value greater than
or
, respectively, and we can ignore them,
for in a similar way,
and
are the only possibilities,
and for , all three work.
Also, to be in the triangle, and
.
Since is the only point that can possibly influence the
coordinate other than
, we look at that first.
If , then
,
so it can only be that , and
.
Now, considering the coordinate, note that if any of
are
(
would influence the least, so we test that),
then ,
which would mean that , so
,
and now
,
and finally, .
See also
1993 AIME (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | ||
Preceded by Problem 11 |
Followed by Problem 13 | |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 | ||
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