HMMT Spring 2021 Guts Round #0khh
HMMT Spring 2021 Guts RoundHard
From module Telescoping Sums and Products
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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.
Sums and productsTelescoping series
Problem
Problem: A tournament among ranked teams is played over rounds. In each round, two teams are selected uniformly at random among all remaining teams to play against each other. The better ranked team always wins, and the worse ranked team is eliminated. Let be the probability that the second best ranked team is eliminated in the last round. Compute .