A man parked in a supermarket car park and walked towards the shop. On his way he noticed something wrong with the numbering of the individual spaces. Neighbouring spaces had the numbers 88, 68, 06 and 16 painted on the floor next to them, when they should have been consecutive numbers. Why was this?

(In reply to I suppose really... by Helen)

Re the longest sequence....

It depends on what font you're using. With most fonts the only 'invertible' numbers are 0,1,6,8,9 - in which case the longest sequence is four: *8, *9, *0, *1 because the preceding number (*7) and following number (*2) contain non-invertible numbers (7 & 2 resp.).

However, if you consider how numbers appear on a calculator then 2 and 5 are also invertible - which increase the longest sequence to 5: *8, *9, *0, *1, *2 as both *7 and *3 are non-invertible.

Posted by fwaff on 2003-07-10 06:27:21