I’d like to ask the good people of this community that, if you do know the solution or figure it out, that you not share the answer here. Feel free to announce your success, but there’s something to be said for discovering the answer completely unaided, even if it takes years.
It’s embarrassingly obvious once you see it though.
Figured it out. Weirdly, knowing you solved it made me confident I could too, and I don’t even know you 🤔
spoiler
I focused on the anomaly ignoring the rest, tried to see what possible rules could lead to it, then went back to see which rule also applied to the “non-anomalous” numbers.
Yes, the hint that the answer was obvious once you knew it was extremely helpful.
I’m not that quick with math, so knowing that the answer was going to be simple helped a lot. Every time I had an idea that was too complicated, I shelved it and kept looking for something that might be simpler.
It also helped that I was a camp counselor, and one of our survival techniques was to have riddles with simple rules that the counselors were able to operate very easily, but which the kids used lots of brain power to try to figure out.
This is exactly how George Bernard Dantzig proved two previously unproven statistical theorems, when he thought they were homework assignments.
Once I saw a video about Mario Kart speedrunning history and there was a record on Rainbow Road that lasted for years. Than someone broke it but just told the community without showing how it was done. In a couple of days someone else figured it out and did it too. Sometimes we just need to know it is possible
Amazing story 💫
Thank you