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Tatami-Free Rooms

Problem 256

Published on 19 September 2009 at 01:00 am [Server Time]

Tatami are rectangular mats, used to completely cover the floor of a room, without overlap.

Assuming that the only type of available tatami has dimensions 1×2, there are obviously some limitations for the shape and size of the rooms that can be covered.

For this problem, we consider only rectangular rooms with integer dimensions a, b and even size s = a·b.
We use the term 'size' to denote the floor surface area of the room, and — without loss of generality — we add the condition ab.

There is one rule to follow when laying out tatami: there must be no points where corners of four different mats meet.
For example, consider the two arrangements below for a 4×4 room:


The arrangement on the left is acceptable, whereas the one on the right is not: a red "X" in the middle, marks the point where four tatami meet.

Because of this rule, certain even-sized rooms cannot be covered with tatami: we call them tatami-free rooms.
Further, we define T(s) as the number of tatami-free rooms of size s.

The smallest tatami-free room has size s = 70 and dimensions 7×10.
All the other rooms of size s = 70 can be covered with tatami; they are: 1×70, 2×35 and 5×14.
Hence, T(70) = 1.

Similarly, we can verify that T(1320) = 5 because there are exactly 5 tatami-free rooms of size s = 1320:
20×66, 22×60, 24×55, 30×44 and 33×40.
In fact, s = 1320 is the smallest room-size s for which T(s) = 5.

Find the smallest room-size s for which T(s) = 200.


Answer:
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