Among the most satisfying quantity puzzles require little mathematical know-how. In truth, cracking the one under requires pondering that’s fairly nonmathematical. I don’t know the place or once I first encountered this sequence—it will need to have been round center college. However after researching it extra lately, I used to be unsurprised to search out that mathematician John Horton Conway, a lover of leisure arithmetic well-known for his zero-player Recreation of Life, wrote a playful paper in regards to the sample and its variants for the College of Cambridge pupil journal Eureka. This puzzle’s mixture of seeming impenetrability, generative complexity and a easy resolution makes the sequence pleasant to resolve and to share.
And so, with out additional ado: What comes subsequent on this sample?
The following line is 13112221, adopted by 1113213211. Do you’ve got any theories for the way it works?
Learn on to search out out …
This sample is called the “look-and-say” sequence as a result of, for every entry, you learn out and write down what you noticed within the earlier line.
The sequence begins with 1, so the following line is “one 1” (aka 11), the next line is “two 1’s” (aka 21), then you definately get “one 2, one 1” (aka 1211), and so forth. The sample can by no means attain numerals past 1, 2 and three. Can you identify why? And what occurs should you introduce different beginning numbers?
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