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Devious Kinder Blocks (Posted on 2008-06-18) Difficulty: 3 of 5
For integral unit increments of x, what equation generates the values of y which are represented in the blocks?

Avoid the obvious.

3
10
21
36


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.

  Submitted by brianjn    
Rating: 4.0000 (1 votes)
Solution: (Hide)
The problem image is a simple HTML table.
The trick is in the hiding of the information.

The cells of the top bar of each letter have a "title" attribute added to the TD tag. When the mouse is passed over these cells you see some "hover information".

Originally I had transparent GIF images in place. These need an IMG tag to locate them on a page. "Alt" is often used as alternate text when a browser cannot locate/present an image; most browsers show this text after a few moments if the mouse is left over the image, but not so Opera. If an image can be display then Opera shuts down the Alt text message.

[title="..."] is a legitimate attribute for the IMG tag to which Opera responds but prefaces the comment with 'Title:'.

My thanks to Levik for pointing out that I did not need the GIF. When dragging the mouse cursor over the table to highlight it you see nothing, but you do if there is an image, or text.

To the Solution:
The numbers which are visible are triangular numbers that satisfy y = 2x(2x+1)/2

With the addition of the "title" values, 1, 6, 15 and 28 we have a series:
1, 3, 6, 10, 15, 21, 28, 36

The equation is: y = x*(x+1)/2

For those concerned about category I did wrestle with that, but because I was playing "Hide and Seek" I thought Tricks was the best.

Comments: ( You must be logged in to post comments.)
  Subject Author Date
Puzzle ThoughtsK Sengupta2024-02-27 06:56:31
2 equationsLarry2008-06-22 15:39:13
re(4): A sequential look....Charlie2008-06-19 10:16:32
re(3): A sequential look....brianjn2008-06-19 04:18:58
re(2): A sequential look....Dej Mar2008-06-19 03:56:24
re: A sequential look....brianjn2008-06-19 00:38:28
Solutionwhere's the trick?Paul2008-06-18 18:36:23
Some ThoughtsA sequential look....Dej Mar2008-06-18 17:01:02
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