2018 AIME I Problems/Problem 9

Find the number of four-element subsets of $\{1,2,3,4,\dots, 20\}$ with the property that two distinct elements of a subset have a sum of $16$ , and two distinct elements of a subset have a sum of $24$ . For example, $\{3,5,13,19\}$ and $\{6,10,20,18\}$ are two such subsets.

Solutions

Solution Exclusion Awareness

This problem is tricky because it is the capital of a few "bashy" calculations. Nevertheless, the process is straightforward. Call the set $\{a, b, c, d\}$ .

Note that there are only two cases: 1 where $a + b = 16$ and $c + d = 24$ or 2 where $a + b = 16$ and $a + c = 24$ . Also note that there is no overlap between the two situations! This is because if they overlapped, adding the two equations of both cases and canceling out gives you $a=d$ , which is absurd.

Case 1. This is probably the simplest: just make a list of possible combinations for $\{a, b\}$ and $\{c, d\}$ . We get $\{1, 15\}\dots\{7, 9\}$ for the first and $\{4, 20\}\dots\{11, 13\}$ for the second. That appears to give us $7*8=56$ solutions, right? NO. Because elements can't repeat, take out the supposed sets $\{1, 15, 9, 15\}, \{2, 14, 10, 14\}, \{3, 13, 11, 13\}, \{4, 16, 4, 20\}, \{5, 11, 5, 19\},$ $\{5, 11, 11, 13\}, \{6, 10, 6, 18\}, \{6, 10, 10, 14\}, \{7, 9, 9, 15\}, \{7, 9, 7, 17\}$ That's ten cases gone. So $46$ for Case 1.

Case 2. We can look for solutions by listing possible $a$ values and filling in the blanks. Start with $a=4$ , as that is the minimum. We find $\{4, 12, 20, ?\}$ , and likewise up to $a=15$ . But we can't have $a=8$ or $a=12$ because $a=b$ or $a=c$ , respectively! Now, it would seem like there are $10$ values for $a$ and $17$ unique values for each $?$ , giving a total of $170$ , but that is once again not true because there are some repeated values! We can subtract 1 from all pairs of sets that have two elements in common, because those can give us identical sets. There are 3 pairs about $a=8$ and 3 pairs about $a=12$ , meaning we lose $6$ . That's $164$ for Case 2.