HMMT Spring 2021 Team Round #0kl7

HMMT Spring 2021 Team RoundHard

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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.

Problem

Problem: Let $k$ and $n$ be positive integers and let

S=\left\{\left(a_{1}, \ldots, a_{k}\right) \in \mathbb{Z}^{k} \mid 0 \leq a_{k} \leq \cdots \leq a_{1} \leq n, a_{1}+\cdots+a_{k}=k\right\}

Determine, with proof, the value of

\sum_{\left(a_{1}, \ldots, a_{k}\right) \in S}\binom{n}{a_{1}}\binom{a_{1}}{a_{2}} \cdots\binom{a_{k-1}}{a_{k}}

in terms of $k$ and $n$ , where the sum is over all $k$ -tuples $\left(a_{1}, \ldots, a_{k}\right)$ in $S$ .