Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Problem 7

"How many sequences of length n can be composed from a, b, c, and d in such a way that a and b are never neighboring elements."

2 comments:

Arnie said...

Is it 4Pn - 3Pn

Reasoning- First take all possible permutations and then consider grp (a,b), c ,d.. get permutations for that and then subtract it from the
from the set of all combinations

Thanh-Nhan Nguyen said...

In this question, aa...a is a valid sequence (repetitions are allowed). Then, I don't think using permutations is a good approach. Let's try with n = 2, 4Pn - 3Pn does not give the correct answer.