Flipping Bits in a Matrix

Puzzle: An 8×8 matrix contains zeros and ones. You may repeatedly choose any 3×3 or 4×4 block and flip all bits in the block (that is, convert zeros to ones, and ones to zeros). Can you remove all the ones in the matrix?

Source: Gurmeet Singh Manku's Blog where he said that he saw it in an old Russian problem book.

Solution:
Highlight the part between the * symbols for the answer.
* There are 36 3×3 blocks and 25 4×4 blocks. Given a sequence of blocks, the same effect is achieved no matter in what order the blocks are chosen. If the same block occurs two times in a sequence, their effect is nullified. Thus, a sequence of blocks is equivalent in effect to some subset of the 36 + 25 = 61 blocks. Starting with all zeros, at most 2^61 distinct configurations out of 2^64 possible configurations of the matrix can be reached. This means that we may not be able to remove all the ones from the original matrix. *

Fundoo question!!

Comments

  1. Tiger7:32 PM, November 11, 2009

    an easier solution might be to consider the counter-example of an 8X8 matrix with one corner being 1 and the rest being zeros. This corner can be "affected" by only two 3X3 or 4X4 blocks and thus, it can never be changed to a 0 without changing something else too.
    QED.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Pratik Poddar7:37 PM, November 11, 2009

    @omkar

    We can have a series of 3X3 or 4X4 matrix. In your example, its obvious that one cannot do it in 1 operation. How can you prove that its not possible to do this by a series of operations?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Buying Dimsums

Source: Alok Goyal (Stellaris VP, Ex-Helion VC) puzzle blog Problem: A fast food restaurant sells dimsums in boxes of 7 and 3. What’s the greatest number of dimsums a person cannot buy. Generalize it for p and q where p and q are relatively prime. I loved the puzzle. Hope you enjoy it too.
Read more

Fraction Brainteaser

Source: Sent to me by Gaurav Sinha Problem: Siddhant writes a Maths test and correctly answers 5 out of 6 Arithmetic questions and 20 out of 28 Geometry questions.  In total, Siddhant scores 25 out of 34.  Vaibhav writes another Maths test and correctly answers 20 out of 25 Arithmetic questions and 6 out of 9 Geometry questions. in total, Vaibhav scores 26 out of 34. Note that a) Vaibhav scores more than Siddhant b) Siddhant score better than Vaibhav in both individual topics -  5/6 > 20/25 and 20/28 > 6/9 How is it possible? 
Read more

Consecutive Heads

Let's say A keep tossing a fair coin, until he get 2 consecutive heads, define X to be the number of tosses for this process; B keep tossing another fair coin, until he get 3 consecutive heads, define Y to be the number of the tosses for this process. 1) Calculate P{X>Y} 2) What's the expected value of X 3) What's the expected value of Y This is probably the hardest puzzle I have ever put on my blog. Hence, I will post its solution in the post directly rather than on comment. Solution: 1) (Solved by me finally after 13 months :)) Make a state diagram. Let the state be (a,b) where a is the number of consecutive heads streak "A" is on currently and b is the number of consecutive heads streak "B" is on currently. So, (0,3) (1,3) are final accepted states and (2,0) (2,1) (2,2) (2,3) are failure states. If you get tails, your contribution to the state reaches to "0" f(State) = P(X>Y | "State" configuration initially) ...
Read more