Problem

Source: All-Russian MO 2023 Final stage 9.8

Tags: combinatorics



Petya has $10, 000$ balls, among them there are no two balls of equal weight. He also has a device, which works as follows: if he puts exactly $10$ balls on it, it will report the sum of the weights of some two of them (but he doesn't know which ones). Prove that Petya can use the device a few times so that after a while he will be able to choose one of the balls and accurately tell its weight.