Blues must be separated!

How many ways are there to arrange 5 red, 5 blue, and 5 green balls in a row such that no two blue balls lie next to each other?


The answer is 116424.

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3 solutions

Ravi Dwivedi
Oct 12, 2015

Let us temporarily repaint the red and the green balls black and line the black balls up in a row.Arranging 10 10 black balls and 5 5 blue balls so that no two blue balls are next to each other is the same as placing 5 5 blue balls into 11 11 "buckets" between the black balls, and at the ends of the row of the black balls, so that no two blue balls are in the same buckets.That is, we choose just 5 5 buckets out of 11 11 - this can be done in ( 11 5 ) {11 \choose 5} ways. Finally, there are ( 10 5 ) {10 \choose 5} ways to repaint the black balls red and green. Thus the answer is ( 11 5 ) ( 10 5 ) = 116424 {11 \choose 5} {10 \choose 5}= \boxed{116424}

Moderator note:

Nice approach used here. Figuring out where the blue balls go first, because they create the most trouble.

Did the exact same

Aditya Kumar - 5 years ago

Can someone please tell me where I am going wrong? My solution:

Since the ordering of the red and the green balls does not matter, firstly PERMUTE 10 objects (5+5) = 10!

AND

Choose 5 out of the 11 spaces in between them (similar to what Ravi did) = 11C5

AND

Permute the 5 blue balls in the 5 spaces chosen = 5!

Therefore, my answer comes down to 10! x 11C5 x 5! = 2.0118*10^11

Please help me :)

Raivat Shah - 3 years, 5 months ago

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The balls are of same color i.e 5 red and 5 green. So the permutation for the 10 balls would be 10!/(5! * 5!) = 252

Choosing 5 out of 11 spaces = 11C5 = 462

Permute 5 blue balls in 5 spaces is 1 as it's same color again i.e 5!/5!

So the answer would be 252 * 462 * 1 = 116424.

Hope, it clarifies!

karthik jayaraman - 3 years, 1 month ago

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Yes, it did! Thank you so much :)

Raivat Shah - 3 years, 1 month ago

Did same here

D K - 2 years, 10 months ago

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Ya Did same here too.

D K - 2 years, 10 months ago

instead of permutation, combination should be used here, because balls in the same color are identical; if using permutation here must be permutation with repetition.

Wenxu Li - 1 year, 9 months ago
Abhisek Panigrahi
Oct 22, 2017

Here's another approach using stars and bars:

We need to place blue balls in such a way that no two blue balls are next to each other. That means between two blue balls, there's at least one red or green ball. Let's think that one red or green ball will come right to each first four blue balls.

So one of the possible way is _ | *_ | *_ | *_ | *_ | _ \text{\_ | *\_ | *\_ | *\_ | *\_ | \_} . Here each vertical bars are blue balls and each stars are any of red or green balls that appear right to each first blue balls. We'll think bars and stars as a unit while selecting the place for them to sit. So we need to place first the bars( blue balls) and then the stars will be placed right to them. We have 11 places from which we need to choose 5 place for the blue balls to place, which can be done in ( 11 5 ) = 462 \binom{11}{5} = 462 ways.

Now for the the first * we have 10 balls to choose from, for the second * we have 9 balls to choose from, ..., for the last * we have 7 balls to choose from. Similarly for the first _ we have 6 balls to choose from, for the second _ we have 5 balls to choose from and so on. There we can fill rest of the * and _ in 10 ! 10! ways.

We placed the blue balls one by one but we permuted the red and green balls while placing, so they can be rearranged themselves, so to overcome over counting we'll divide by 5 ! 2 5!^2 .

\therefore Total no of ways to place blue , red and green balls so that no two blue balls are together = 462 × 10 ! 5 ! 2 = 116424 = \frac{462 \times 10!}{5!^2} = 116424

Ritabrata Roy
Apr 26, 2018

Simply,we have to sit a blue ball between two other painted balls or on the two corners.

Thus we have 9+2 available sits for 5 blue ball

In those 11 seat 5 blue balls may sit in 11C5 different ways.

For each of arrangement in 11C5 the 5 red and 5 green may sit in [[10!/5!*5! ]]=R different ways.

Thus answer becomes 11C5*R=116424

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