Petals Around the Rose
Here's an interesting game of pattern-seeking that was presented on Slashdot earlier. It's called Petals Around the Rose, which prompts you to roll five dice and predict how many "Petals around the Rose" there are.
Anecdotal history apparently credits Bill Gates as having solved the riddle of the game back in the very early days of his career. After all his buddies had all figured it out, he was the sole person left baffled by the game. Rather than discerning the pattern, he only solved it by memorizing many sequences of dice, a brute-force, hamfisted method of cheating against the spirit of the game (something that would come to characterize his business practices in the future).
Maybe you can do better than Bill Gates - can you discern the pattern without resorting to memorization?
(Via BoingBoing.)
posted by CC @ 1:53 AM
1 comments
1 Comments:
Hi, I'm no M$ fanboy but you are being too critical of Bill Gates. It's just a game after all and all that matters is that you have fun playing the game and get the satisfaction when you manage to solve it.
Indeed, his brute force method is like that of a computer programmer...calculating all the possible values to get an answer. Different people use different methods to solve puzzles....pattern recognition, brute force, mathematical...take your pick...when all else fails, try brute force...though it's not the most elegant method
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