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Balkan Mathematical Olympiad 2018 p3

Source: BMO 2018

May 9, 2018
conicscombinatorics

Problem Statement

Alice and Bob play the following game: They start with non-empty piles of coins. Taking turns, with Alice playing first, each player choose a pile with an even number of coins and moves half of the coins of this pile to the other pile. The game ends if a player cannot move, in which case the other player wins.
Determine all pairs (a,b)(a,b) of positive integers such that if initially the two piles have aa and bb coins respectively, then Bob has a winning strategy.
Proposed by Dimitris Christophides, Cyprus