$2n$ students take part in a math competition. First, each of the students sends its task to the members of the jury, after which each of the students receives from the jury one of proposed tasks (all received tasks are different). Let's call the competition honest, if there are $n$ students who were given the tasks suggested by the remaining $n$ participants. Prove that the number of task distributions in which the competition is honest is a square of natural numbers.
Problem
Source: Ukraine TST 2018 p11
Tags: Perfect Square, combinatorics
17.01.2021 09:24
Very nice problem! I will use fair instead of honest. Consider a functional graph with $2n$ vertices, where $v_i\rightarrow v_j$ if the proposer of problem $i$ receives problem $j$. The given conditions simply imply there exist a set of $n$ students who didn't receive any problems from the set, so the functional graph is "bipartite", or all cycles are even. Let $(2n-1)!!=\prod\limits_{i=1}^n (2i-1)$ I claim the number of fair tournaments is exactly $(2n-1)!!^2$. We will first prove a lemma. Lemma. $$\sum\limits_{i=0}^{n-1} \frac{\binom{2i}{i}}{4^i} = \frac{(2n-1)!!^2}{(2n-1)!}$$ Proof of Lemma. We will proceed by induction. The base case, $n=1$ is clear. We will assume result for $n$ and prove this for $n+1$. Note $$\frac{(2n+1)!!^2}{(2n+1)!}-\frac{(2n-1)!!^2}{(2n-1)!}=\frac{(2n-1)!!^2}{(2n+1)!} ((2n+1)^2-(2n+1)(2n)) = \frac{(2n-1)!!^2 (2n+1)}{(2n+1)!} $$ $$=\frac{(2n-1)!!^2}{(2n)!}$$ Notice $(2n-1)!!=\frac{(2n)!}{2^nn!}$, so this is actually $\frac{(2n)!^2}{4^n (n!)^2 (2n)!} = \frac{(2n)!}{4^n (n!)^2}=\binom{2n}{n} 4^{-n}$, completing the induction. Now, let $a_n$ be the number of fair selections for $2n$ contestants. If $a_1$ is in a cycle of $2k$ people, then there are $\prod_{i=1}^{2k-1} (2n-i)$ ways to choose the cycle because there are $2n-i$ to choose the $i$th vertex of the cycle for $i<2k$ if the $0$th vertex is $1$. Then we just need any fair selection for $2(n-k)$ people, which has $a_{n-k}$ selections. We proceed by strong induction to show that $a_i=(2i-1)!!^2$. The base case, $i=1$, is clear. Let $a_0=1$ be the number of ways to choose 0 contestants such that the competition is fair. Therefore, $a_n=\sum\limits_{i=0}^{n-1} \frac{(2n-1)!}{(2i)!} a_i = (2n-1)! \sum\limits_{i=0}^{n-1} \frac{(2i-1)!!^2}{(2i)!} = (2n-1)! \sum\limits_{i=0}^{n-1} \binom{2i}{i} 4^{-i}$, so we are done by our lemma.