MathLabs

Problem 4

A magician has one hundred cards numbered 11 to 100100. He puts them into three boxes, red, white and blue, each nonempty. A member selects two boxes, chooses one card from each, and announces their sum. Given this sum, the magician identifies the box from which no card was chosen. How many assignments of the cards to the three boxes make this always possible?
Step 3 of 5: Force equality
∣A+B∣+∣B+C∣+∣C+A∣≤197.|A+B|+|B+C|+|C+A|\le197.
Detailed analysis

All three sumsets lie in the integers from 3 through 199, so every bound is sharp.