dominos which have faces of values 1 to N.
A train of dominos is a straight line of them, in which any 2 touching dominos display the same value.
Let
be the minimum numbers of trains that are needed to use up all of these dominos. What is the value of
?
As an explicit example, because we have the train listed in the above image.
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Consider a graph with vertices labeled 1 , 2 , … , 2 0 1 6 . Then an edge connecting a and b on the graph corresponds to a domino with numbers [ a ∣ b ] . A train is simply drawing edges from vertex to vertex without lifting up one's pencil which is an Eulerian path, and using up all the dominos corresponds to drawing a complete graph K 2 0 1 6 plus a loop at each vertex that starts and ends there (corresponding to the dominoes with the same number on both ends).
Note that every single vertex of this graph has degree 2 0 1 7 which is odd. Because an Eulerian path can pass through every edge of at most 2 vertices with odd degree, each Eulerian path will only get rid of 2 odd-degree vertices (all the other vertices it passes through will only have an even number less edges untraveled, which doesn't affect its odd-degree status). Thus we must have at least 2 0 1 6 ÷ 2 = 1 0 0 8 different Eulerian paths, or trains.