A rubber band is 1 meter long. An ant starts at one end, crawling at 1 millimeter per second. At the end of each second, the rubber band is instantaneously stretched by an additional meter. (So, at the end of the nth second, the rubber band becomes n+1 meters long.)
Does the ant ever reach the far end of the band? If so, when?
(In reply to
re(3): The backward ant by friedlinguini)
if you look back a few comments youll notice my previous post
which conjectured the answer e^1000. its not the calculation
that you need excel for, brad had that part covered since
he computed probably sufficient values. he did note the curve's
shape, but left it there. in fact the shape is reminiscent of
a logarithm. once you suspect that, you use excel to do
a regression of the data, and the resulting correlation
factors leave little room for doubt. ofcourse
you wouldnt be able to compute all values, but its not
necessary.
re(4): The backward ant
