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An Orderly Vacation
A puzzle from Peter Winkler’s excellent Mathematical Puzzles (2021):
A certain island contains a network of roads. Each road segment (between one intersection and the next) has its own name. If d is the average number of road segments that meet at an intersection, show that it’s possible to take a drive on the island that traverses at least d road segments and hits them in alphabetical order.
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Each road has two ends, so the total number of road ends observed at the island’s intersections is twice the number of roads on the island. The number we’re…
The skinny
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