So, overall, it appears that this AIME was not particularly difficult, but allowed people to make copious mistakes and drop their scores significantly. Cool... not. But anyway, some brief comments.
1. Decent NT, a good problem to start off with, though slightly more difficult than it usually is.
2. BIG paragraph, lots of text. Tripped up many people due to misreadings, but otherwise decent.
3. Easy? Just expand.
4. Stupid, more a test of your ability to think of what the test writers were thinking of than math.
5. Kind of lame, but easy enough to not be a problem. Just takes a little time.
6. Cool problem, dynamic programming comes in handy here.
7. Also pretty nice, good exercise in logs and summations.
8. Not bad either, I did not recognize the solution at first. In the end, it came down to the Euclidean Algorithm for polynomials basically.
9. Decent geometry, but quite a long problem.
10. What? The only reasonable way to do this was brute force counting. Anything else would have been too hard to come up with.
11. Too easy and well-known. Something similar but more difficult has shown up on the Putnam.
12. Eww... anything involving three different radicals should not be allowed.
13. Still not sure how to do this, but it seemed reasonable to most people.
14. Too easy to guess, but a cool problem nonetheless. Recurrences are a lot cooler than ugly geometry or counting.
15. Way beyond me, I do not like geometry problems as number 15.
So there we go! You can find the problems here if you so wish.
wait where's the secret question on the back?
ReplyDeleteShh! It's a secret!
ReplyDelete#15 could be done with similar triangles in fifteen minutes as it took me
ReplyDelete