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I was just writing this out! I believe practice in unit testing is what let me get this question right. I almost submitted n^1, n^2, n^3 before I realized I didn't get any wrong answers and something didn't feel right. I credit this 'instinct' to having written thousands of tests, and trying to make them fail to make sure my tests weren't lying to me.

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It's funny. Even though I got the right answer, looking back, I still see many holes in my tests. I only tested positive and negative integers. I didn't even think to try fractions, decimals, hex values, text, etc. and I was already expecting a confirmation bias test.

got tricked even if I tested 1, 1, 1

1, 1, 1 was actually the test case that clued me in that n^1, n^2, n^3 couldn't be the right solution.

n=1?

But I totally see why it would cause you to pause and rethink your original idea :).

The point is that it didn't work, so exponentiation was out the window.

My point was that 1,1,1 is 1^1,1^2,1^3 and actually fits the pattern :).

Right - by fitting the pattern but failing the actual criterion, it disproves the consecutive exponents hypothesis.

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