Advent calendar 2020
6 December
There are 12 ways of placing 2 tokens on a 2×4 grid so that no two tokens are next to each other horizonally, vertically or diagonally:
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Today's number is the number of ways of placing 5 tokens on a 2×10 grid so that no two tokens are next to each other horizonally, vertically or diagonally.
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First, consider placing 5 tiles in a 1×9 grid. There is only one way to do this:
O | O | O | O | O |
To get the number of ways of placing 5 tiles in a 1×10 grid, imagine adding an extra blank square to either the start or end of the grid or between two of the counters.
There are 6 places this tile could be inserted leading to 6 arrangements of 5 tiles in a 1×10 grid.
For 5 tiles in a 2×10 grid, you can first pick the columns the tiles go in (as a tile being in a column means nothing can be placed the columns either side, the number of ways to pick
columns is the same and the number of wats to arrange 5 tokens in a 1×10 grid). For each of these column choices, there are two locations for each tile (top or bottom).
This leads to a total number of arrangements of 6×25=192.
Tags: numbers, combinatorics
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