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Berkeley Math Circle: Monthly Contest 2 #0jq5

Berkeley Math Circle: Monthly Contest 2Hard

From module Advanced Inequalities

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Understand the scale
Scale 0.5: Easiest math competition problems, often solvable even for early middle school students without experience. 1: Problems strictly for beginners, often at a moderate middle school level. 1.5: Problems for stronger beginner students, on the level of the middling problems in most middle school contests. 2: For motivated beginners, harder questions from the previous categories. 2.5: More advanced beginner problems, hardest questions from previous categories. 3: Early intermediate problems that require more creative thinking. 3.5: Tougher early intermediate problems that consistently stretch into higher-level creative thinking or conceptual knowledge. 4: Intermediate-level problems. 4.5: Upper intermediate problems approaching the upper bound for non-invitational sprint math competitions. 5: More difficult AIME problems or simple proof-based Olympiad-style problems. 6: High-level AIME-styled questions or introductory Olympiad-level questions. 7: Tougher Olympiad-level questions, may require more technical knowledge. 8: High-level Olympiad-level questions. 9: Expert Olympiad-level questions. 9.5: The hardest problems appearing on Olympiads which the strongest students could reasonably solve. 10: Historically notorious problems, generally unsuitable for even very hard competitions because they are exceedingly tedious, long, and difficult.
Jensen / smoothingExpected values

Problem

Problem:

Yan and Jacob play the following game. Yan shows Jacob a weighted 4-sided die labelled 11, 22, 33, 44, with weights 12\frac{1}{2}, 13\frac{1}{3}, 17\frac{1}{7}, 142\frac{1}{42}, respectively. Then, Jacob specifies 44 positive real numbers x1,x2,x3,x4x_{1}, x_{2}, x_{3}, x_{4} such that x1+x2+x3+x4=1x_{1}+x_{2}+x_{3}+x_{4}=1. Finally, Yan rolls the die, and Jacob earns 10+log⁡(xk)10+\log \left(x_{k}\right) dollars if the die shows kk (note this may be negative). Which xix_{i} should Jacob pick to maximize his expected payoff?

(Here log is the natural logarithm, which has base e≈2.718e \approx 2.718.)

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