several football teams enter a tournament in which every team plays every other team exactly once. Show that at any moment during the tournament, there will be two teams who have played, up to that moment, an identical number of games

Respuesta :

Two teams have the same number of played games.

What is pigeonhole Principle?

  • The pigeonhole principle is one of the simplest but most useful ideas in mathematics, and can rescue us here.
  • \A basic version says that if (N+1) pigeons occupy N holes, then some hole must have at least 2 pigeons. Thus if 5 pigeons occupy 4 holes, then there must be some hole with at least 2 pigeons.
  • If n + 1 or more pigeons occupy n pigeonholes, there will be more than one pigeon in at least one pigeonhole.

Suppose that there are n football teams in the tournament.

The number of games for a team is either 1 or 2 or 3 . . . or (n – 1). These (n – 1) numbers correspond to (n – 1) pigeonholes in which the n teams are to be housed. So at least two of them should be in the same pigeonhole.

Therefore, At some moment, two teams have the same number of played games.

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