A number of the most satisfying quantity puzzles require little mathematical know-how. In truth, cracking the one under requires considering that’s fairly nonmathematical. I don’t know the place or after I first encountered this sequence—it should have been round center faculty. However after researching it extra just lately, I used to be unsurprised to seek out that mathematician John Horton Conway, a lover of leisure arithmetic well-known for his zero-player Sport of Life, wrote a playful paper concerning the sample and its variants for the College of Cambridge scholar journal Eureka. This puzzle’s mixture of seeming impenetrability, generative complexity and a easy resolution makes the sequence pleasant to unravel and to share.
And so, with out additional ado: What comes subsequent on this sample?
The subsequent line is 13112221, adopted by 1113213211. Do you’ve got any theories for the way it works?
Learn on to seek out out …
This sample is named 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 definitely 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 establish why? And what occurs should you introduce different beginning numbers?
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