1999 AIME Problems/Problem 7

Problem

There is a set of 1000 switches, each of which has four positions, called $A, B, C$ , and $D$ . When the position of any switch changes, it is only from $A$ to $B$ , from $B$ to $C$ , from $C$ to $D$ , or from $D$ to $A$ . Initially each switch is in position $A$ . The switches are labeled with the 1000 different integers $(2^{x})(3^{y})(5^{z})$ , where $x, y$ , and $z$ take on the values $0, 1, \ldots, 9$ . At step i of a 1000-step process, the $i$ -th switch is advanced one step, and so are all the other switches whose labels divide the label on the $i$ -th switch. After step 1000 has been completed, how many switches will be in position $A$ ?

Solution

For each $i$ th switch (designated by $x_{i},y_{i},z_{i}$ ), it advances itself only one time at the $i$ th step; thereafter, only a switch with larger $x_{j},y_{j},z_{j}$ values will advance the $i$ th switch by one step provided $d_{i}= 2^{x_{i}}3^{y_{i}}5^{z_{i}}$ divides $d_{j}= 2^{x_{j}}3^{y_{j}}5^{z_{j}}$ . Let $N = 2^{9}3^{9}5^{9}$ be the max switch label. To find the divisor multiples in the range of $d_{i}$ to $N$ , we consider the exponents of the number $\frac{N}{d_{i}}= 2^{9-x_{i}}3^{9-y_{i}}5^{9-z_{i}}$ . In general, the divisor-count of $\frac{N}{d}$ must be a multiple of 4 to ensure that a switch is in position A: