For integral unit increments of x, what equation generates the values of y which are represented in the blocks?
Avoid the obvious.
Hint:
The trick works with
Internet Explorer,
Firefox and
Opera but Opera may behave a little differently to mouse explorations; oh, concentrate on the higher part of each block.
The sequence here is the triangle numbers, although you can only see alternating ones (the evens) in the diagram without the trick. If you point your mouse at the upperleftmost red part of each letter and hold it there, you'll see a hover effect/tooltip with the missing numbers of the sequence. (If your browser doesn't support this feature, you can also view the html source for the page and find these "tricky" numbers--they all look like TITLE="#" where # is the number in question.
The visible number in the xth block then, is the (2x)th trianglular number. Since the nth triangular number is given by n(n+1)/2, the xth block's number should be 2x(2x+1)/2 = x(2x+1), which is consistent with blocks A-D above and the assumption that the block labeled A is block 1, B is block 2, and so on.
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Posted by Paul
on 2008-06-18 18:36:23 |
where's the trick?
