Problem

Source: Tournament of towns Spring 2018 A-level P7

Tags: number theory, ToT



You are in a strange land and you don’t know the language. You know that ”!” and ”?” stand for addition and subtraction, but you don’t know which is which. Each of these two symbols can be written between two arguments, but for subtraction you don’t know if the left argument is subtracted from the right or vice versa. So, for instance, a?b could mean any of a − b, b − a, and a + b. You don’t know how to write any numbers, but variables and parenthesis work as usual. Given two arguments a and b, how can you write an expression that equals 20a − 18b? (12 points) Nikolay Belukhov