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Showing posts from July, 2022

### A phase I'll never forget...

It was the night of 8th August 2021, when we had the closing ceremony of CAMP (A math camp organized by Ritam Nag, Aatman Supkar and Rohal Goyal). My eyes were a bit wet realizing that it is ending and I won't have those 3 - 4 hours of fun every night which I had the whole past week. Thinking that time about all the memories I made in the camp from joining the game nights to getting frank with my seniors, it was probably one of the best experiences I had in any of the math related thing I did. I was fascinated by the organization of this camp and was just wondering if I was good enough to ever do something like this in future, but I never really got enough courage or time to do anything like this until recently. Fast forwarding to the time after INMO results, me and many of my friends were very sad that IMOTC has been cancelled by HBCSE and we couldn't meet each other for another year. Well, jokingly in a meet around that time, Sunaina told me to ask Rohan if they can organize

### Top 10 problems of the week!

This week was full Number Theory and algebra biased!! 😄 Do try all the problems first!! And if you guys get any nice solutions, do post in the comments section! Here are the walkthroughs of this week's top 5 Number Theory problems! 5th position (1999 JBMO P2):  For each nonnegative integer $n$ we define $A_n = 2^{3n}+3^{6n+2}+5^{6n+2}$. Find the greatest common divisor of the numbers $A_0,A_1,\ldots, A_{1999}$. Walkthrough:  It doesn't require a walkthrough, I wrote this here, cause it's a cute problem for the person who has just started Contest math :P a. What is $A_0$? b. Find out $A_1$. c. Show that $\boxed{7}$ is the required answer! 4th position (APMO, Evan Chen's orders modulo a prime handout):   Let $a,b,c$ be distinct integers. Given that $a | bc + b + c, b | ca + c + a$ and $c | ab + a + b$, prove that at least one of $a, b, c$ is not prime. Walkthrough:  Fully thanks to  MSE  ! (Also one should try MSE, it has helped me a lot, ofc it's more tilted to Coll

### Whose Game?

In this blog post, we will talk about Combinatorial games, how to quantify positions, and analyse games. Most of this is based on the beginning chapters of the comprehensive book Winning Ways for your Mathematical Plays by Berlekamp, Conway and Guy. What is a Game? You might be familiar with multiple 'games', all with greatly varied meanings. For example, a  game could refer to a wild animal hunted for sport (This post isn't about those!). We will talk about games that are defined by the following (restrictive) rules: There are just 2 players, often named Left and Right. There are several well-defined positions and a starting position. There are clearly defined rules specifying the moves each player can make from a position, and the resulting positions are called options. Left and Right move alternately in gameplay. In the normal play convention, the player unable to move loses. In misere  play, the last player to move loses. The rules ensure that the game ends and one p