2022-tuple operations
Source: ISL 2022 C7
July 9, 2023
combinatorics
Problem Statement
Lucy starts by writing integer-valued -tuples on a blackboard. After doing that, she can take any two (not necessarily distinct) tuples and that she has already written, and apply one of the following operations to obtain a new tuple:
\begin{align*}
\mathbf{v}+\mathbf{w}&=(v_1+w_1,\ldots,v_{2022}+w_{2022}) \\
\mathbf{v} \lor \mathbf{w}&=(\max(v_1,w_1),\ldots,\max(v_{2022},w_{2022}))
\end{align*}
and then write this tuple on the blackboard.It turns out that, in this way, Lucy can write any integer-valued -tuple on the blackboard after finitely many steps. What is the smallest possible number of tuples that she initially wrote?