Hacker News Reader

Comment by 2510c39011c5 | Hacker News Reader

As for the puzzle on the page, has anyone found out the pattern of the number sequence?

  [3, 6, 9, 21, 22, 47, 78, 89, 134, 225, 368]

View on HN

For what it's worth, The Online Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences[1] confirms his claim.

[1] https://oeis.org/search?q=3%2C+6%2C+9%2C+21%2C+22%2C+47%2C+7...

this is a good database :)

Thanks for the pointer!

I looked at the sequence and said, "I call B.S.—there is no pattern." Then I saw that the solution is at the end of the bio, not in the article (click on "read more"). Spoiler alert: There is no pattern.

It's nice that sometimes intuition works out better than desperate reasoning...

Click the "read more" link after those numbers and all is explained.

...I just spent 1 hour or so on the sequence...and the following clue is the farthest I've got,

the first parameter is the cumulative sum of the sequence,

  >>> log(1002, 10)
  3.0008677215312267
  >>> log(634, 9)
  2.936454025222717
  >>> log(409, 8)
  2.89198567764725
  >>> log(275, 7)
  2.8864493565611764
  >>> log(186, 6)
  2.9165447502641713
  >>> log(108, 5)
  2.9091716996047423
  >>> log(61, 4)
  2.9653686687814433
  >>> log(39, 3)
  3.3347175194727923
  >>> log(18, 2)
  4.169925001442312

EDIT:

yes, I saw that "read more" at first...I did not want to spoil the puzzle so I tried to solve it on my own for a while but then realized I might have to spend more than 1 hour on this thing -- and at this point I totally forgot there is a spoiler there...

Why not just fit a 10th-degree polynomial?

that would be a good universal solution -- it's just that would be too fast and too assuring to get the most fun out of the puzzle...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com