2017 AMC 12A Problems/Problem 25
Problem
The vertices of a centrally symmetric hexagon in the complex plane are given by For each , , an element is chosen from at random, independently of the other choices. Let be the product of the numbers selected. What is the probability that ?
Solution
It is possible to solve this problem using elementary counting methods. This solution proceeds by a cleaner generating function.
We note that both lie on the imaginary axis and each of the have length and angle of odd multiples of , i.e. . When we draw these 6 complex numbers out on the complex plane, we get a crystal-looking thing. Note that the total number of ways to choose 12 complex numbers is . Now we count the number of good combinations.
We first consider the lengths. When we multiply 12 complex numbers together, their magnitudes multiply. Suppose we have of the numbers ; then we must have . Having will take care of the length of the product; now we need to deal with the angle.
We require . Letting be , we see that the angles we have available are , where we must choose exactly 8 angles from the set and exactly 4 from the set . If we found a good combination where we had of each angle , then the amount this would contribute to our count would be . We want to add these all up. We proceed by generating functions.
Consider The expansion will be of the form . Note that if we reduced the powers of mod and fished out the coefficient of and plugged in (and then multiplied by ) then we would be done. Since plugging in doesn't affect the 's, we do that right away. The expression then becomes where the last equality is true because we are taking the powers of mod . Let denote the coefficient of in . Note . We use the roots of unity filter, which states where . In our case , so we only need to find the average of the 's.
See Also
2017 AMC 12A (Problems • Answer Key • Resources) | |
Preceded by Problem 24 |
Followed by Problem ?? |
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