Problem

2021 AIME II Problem 8

An ant makes a sequence of moves on a cube where a move consists of walking from one vertex to an adjacent vertex along an edge of the cube. Initially the ant is at a vertex of the bottom face of the cube and chooses one of the three adjacent vertices to move to as its first move. For all moves after the first move, the ant does not return to its previous vertex, but chooses to move to one of the other two adjacent vertices. All choices are selected at random so that each of the possible moves is equally likely. The probability that after exactly 8 moves that ant is at a vertex of the top face on the cube is \frac{m}{n}, where m and n are relatively prime positive integers. Find m + n.

Leading zeroes must be inputted, so if your answer is 34, then input 034


Full credit goes to MAA for authoring these problems. These problems were taken on the AOPS website.


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Problem Tags: Algebra Counting and probability Game theory Graph theory Number theory

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