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SIMON-MARAIS 2020 A2

  • Paper A

Fiona has a deck of cards labelled 1 to nn, laid out in a row on the table in order from 1 to nn from left to right. Her goal is to arrange them into a single pile, through a series of steps of the following form:

If at some stage the cards are in mm piles, she chooses 1≤k<m1 \leq k < m and arranges the cards into kk piles by picking up pile k+1k+1 and putting it on pile 1; picking up pile k+2k+2 and putting it on pile 2; and so on, working from left to right and cycling back through as necessary.

She repeats this process until the cards are all in a single pile, and then stops. So for example, if n=7n=7 and she chooses k=3k=3 at the first step she will have the following three piles:

7456123\begin{array}{c c c c} 7 & & & \\ 4 & 5 & 6 \\ 1 & 2 & 3 \end{array}

If she then chooses k=1k=1 at the second step, she finishes with the cards in a single pile with the cards ordered 6352741 from top to bottom.

How many different final piles can Fiona end up with?

Official text Simon Marais Mathematics Competition 2020 official paper, page 2. Quoted with source.

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