2015 AMC 12A Problems/Problem 22
Problem
For each positive integer , let be the number of sequences of length consisting solely of the letters and , with no more than three s in a row and no more than three s in a row. What is the remainder when is divided by ?
$\textbf{(A)}\ 0\qquad\textbf{(B)}\ 4\qquad\textbf{(C)}\ 6\qquad\textbf{(D)}}\ 8\qquad\textbf{(E)}\ 10$ (Error compiling LaTeX. Unknown error_msg)
Solution
One method of approach is to find a recurrence for .
Let us define as the number of sequences of length ending with an , and as the number of sequences of length ending in . Note that and , so .
For a sequence of length ending in , it must be a string of s appended onto a sequence ending in of length . So we have the recurrence:
We can thus begin calculating values of . We see that the sequence goes (starting from ):
A problem arises though: the values of increase at an exponential rate. Notice however, that we need only find . In fact, we can abuse the fact that and only find . Going one step further, we need only find and to find .
Here are the values of , starting with :
Since the period is and , .
Similarly, here are the values of , starting with :
Since the period is and , .
Knowing that and , we see that , and . Hence, the answer is .
See Also
2015 AMC 12A (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | |
Preceded by Problem 21 |
Followed by Problem 23 |
1 • 2 • 3 • 4 • 5 • 6 • 7 • 8 • 9 • 10 • 11 • 12 • 13 • 14 • 15 • 16 • 17 • 18 • 19 • 20 • 21 • 22 • 23 • 24 • 25 | |
All AMC 12 Problems and Solutions |