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5 boxes in a circles, moving balls until each box has 17^{5^{2016}} balls ?

Source: Indonesia MO (INAMO) 2016 P3

September 14, 2018
combinatoricsballs

Problem Statement

There are 55 boxes arranged in a circle. At first, there is one a box containing one ball, while the other boxes are empty. At each step, we can do one of the following two operations: i. select one box that is not empty, remove one ball from the box and add one ball into both boxes next to the box, ii. select an empty box next to a non-empty box, from the box the non-empty one moves one ball to the empty box. Is it possible, that after a few steps, obtained conditions where each box contains exactly 175201617^{5^{2016}} balls?