CMSC 250, Spring 2021

Homework #1
Due: Monday 02-08, 11:59 pm (on-time)
Wednesday 02-10, 11:59 pm (late, 50% of credit)
First & Last Name: Matthew Mei
UID (9 digits): 117151411
Section number (4 digits): 0104

In all problems on this homework, you may
leave your answers as

expressions of factorials, P (n, k) terms, and nk terms. You may also use
sum and product notation.

Problem 1: Some Combinatorial Scenarios (40 pts)

(a) In the province of Manitoba, Canada, vehicle license plate IDs are created by concate-
nating three uppercase letters (of the standard 26-letter English alphabet) followed
by three digits (0-9). It is possible to reuse the same letter or digit more than once.
Additionally, there are two options for the border of the plate - a standard version,
and a bilingual version. Each unique license plate has both an ID and a border -
changing either one results in a different plate.

(i) How many total possible unique Manitoba license plates can be made? (2 pts)

2 * 26 * 26 * 26 * 10 * 10 * 10 = 35,152,000

(ii) Suppose you would like to press (manufacture) two distinct Manitoba license
plates as a test of the presses. It does not matter what order they are pressed
in. In how many ways can you press such a pair? (4 pts)
35152000


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(b) Suppose that we have a postcard stall, and we have a collection of 75 (seventy-five)
unique postcards. 40 (forty) of them are landscapes, and 35 (thirty-five) are portraits.
A customer wants to buy a box of 20 (twenty) distinct postcards, and they have asked
us to choose randomly. Note that we only care which postcards are present in the
box. How many boxes may be created if:

(i) We want the box to contain 7 landscape postcards and 13 portrait postcards?
(2 pts)
40 35



7 × 13

(ii) We want the box to have at most 3 portrait postcards? (4 pts)

40 35 40 35 40 35 40 35









17 × 3 + 18 × 2 + 19 × 1 + 20 × 0

(c) An unsupervised kid is playing at a restaurant’s soda fountain. The fountain offers
12 (twelve) unique types of soda, and the kid pours one standard-size soft drink cup
of each type. They want to organize the filled soda cups into a row from left to right.

(i) How many distinct rows of sodas can the kid make? (1 pt)

12!

(ii) How many distinct rows of just 6 (six) of the cups can the kid make? (2 pts)

P(12,6)

(iii) The kid realizes that there are more sizes than just standard, there’s also mini and
jumbo. They pour one mini cup and one jumbo cup of each type of soda, resulting in
36 (thirty-six) total cups: 3 (three) sizes with 12 (twelve) unique cups of soda of each
size. They now want to arrange all these cups into 3 rows - all 12 mini cups in front,
all 12 standard cups in the middle, and all 12 jumbo cups in the back. How many
ways can the kid arrange the 36 soda cups according to these constraints? (5 pts)

12! ×12! ×12!

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(d) You are writing code for a video hosting website, where users are allowed to upload
their own videos. In your code, each video is assigned a unique random ID string when
it is uploaded. These ID strings must be between 6 (six) and fourteen (14) characters
inclusive, and they are only permitted to use lowercase alphanumeric characters (the
26 English lowercase letters, and the digits 0-9). How many different unique ID strings
exist if:

(i) Characters are chosen with replacement? (4 pts)

P14 n
n=6 36

(ii) Characters are chosen without replacement? (4 pts)

P14
n=6 P (36, n)

(e) Erika’s Sweet Shop has 4 (four) flavors of ice cream: chocolate, mint chip, strawberry,
and vanilla. A triple-scoop cone is a stack of any 3 (three) scoops of ice cream, where
the same flavor may be included multiple times. Note that this is necessarily ordered
because the three scoops are arranged top-to-bottom in a stack. How many different
triple-scoop cones exist that:

(i) Do not contain any scoops of vanilla? (3 pts)

3 × 3 × 3 = 27

(ii) Contain at most two scoops of mint chip? (4 pts)

64 - 1 = 63

(f) How many distinct permutations are there of each of the following words:

(i) “dextrous” (1 pt) 8!

(ii) “amalgam” (2 pts) (7! )/(3! ×2! )

(iii) “desiderata” (2 pts) (10! )/((2! ) × (2! ) × (2! ))

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Problem 2: Coin Stacking (25 pts)

For the following five problems, please write your answer on the provided line. No
justification is required.

You work at the U.S. Mint, and you have access to an unlimited supply of four types
of coins - pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. You are bored and would like to stack 11
(eleven) coins in a tower. The order of coins in the tower matters. You may assume that
coins of the same type are indistinguishable - any penny is the same as any other penny,
and so on for all types. You can put any coin anywhere in the tower.

Please respond to the following questions. Note that you are always making a tower
of 11 coins.

(a) How many possible towers are there? 411

11


(b) How many possible towers contain exactly four nickels? 37 × 4

P2 n 11


(c) How many possible towers contain at least nine dimes? n=0 3 × n

(d) How many possible towers contain exactly two nickels

11 9



AND exactly three quarters? 26 × 2 × 3

(e) How many possible towers contain exactly two nickels

11 9



OR exactly three quarters? 3 9 + 3 8 − 26 × 2 × 3
(Note that this includes the scenario of both at once.
Be careful of overlapping cases!)

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Problem 3: Special Ten-Character Strings (20 pts)

For the following five problems, please write your answer on the provided line. No
justification is required.

You are interested in the ten-character numeric strings where every digit, 0-9, appears
exactly once. (Note that because these are strings, and not numbers, it is allowed to have
a 0 as the first character in the string.) We call these unique-digit strings of length 10.
You want to know how many unique-digit strings of length 10 contain certain interesting
substrings.

How many possible unique-digit strings of length 10 are there that contain:

(a) the substring 0123? 7!

(b) the substrings 31 and 742? 7!

(c) the substrings 56, 78, and 90? 7!

(d) the substrings 456 and 643? 0

(e) the substrings 059 and 967? 6

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Problem 4: Which is Larger? (15 pts)
Consider both of the following quantities:

(A): The number of ways to select and arrange 750 elements in a row from a set
of 15,000 unique elements.
(B): The number of subsets of size 750 of a set with 15,000 unique elements.
Now, answer both of the following:

(a) Without computing the values of these quantities, which of (A) or (B) is larger
and why? It may help to compare the selection process for each type of object.
You must justify your answer in full sentences using primarily words and reasoning -
answers that are computation-based or rely on algebra will lose credit. (12 pts)

(b) Based
on your answer to the above, which of these two quantities is larger :
15000
750 , or P (15000, 750)? No work required - simply state the larger quantity. (3 pts)

BEGIN YOUR ANSWER BELOW THIS LINE

(a) Scenario A will be larger because in its situation, the way 750 elements are arranged
matters whereas in B it does not. As an example, a set of 750 elements arranged forward
and backward are different cases because the order in which they appear matters. In sit-
uation B, the forwards and backwards set of 750 elements in a subset are considered one
case as they contain all the same elements. Therefore, given this simple case, we know that
situation A will result in a larger value than B.
15000


(b) 750

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SCRAP SPACE BELOW