A competition!

acidyo (80)in #competition • 6 years ago (edited)

This is going to be a bit of a unique competition, maybe.

Have you ever done those IQ tests where they give you 4 numbers in a row and you're supposed to see patterns and guess what the 5th would be? Think of this that way.

I will place a row of numbers and you will have to guess the next two.

20, 320, 1000, 900, 1800, 3900, 16000, ___ , ___ .

How the winner is chosen will be announced in 1 day. :)

#come #compete #competing #competitors

6 years ago in #competition by acidyo (80)

$10.95

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nicholaslive (66) 6 years ago

@acidyo, my edited submission:

"Polynomials can be used to approximate complicated curves"
By placing your numbers as points on a graph:
1, 20
2, 320
3, 1000
4, 900
5, 1800
6, 3900
7, 16000
8, ?
9, ?
We can enter the data into an interpolating polynomial online calculator like https://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=interpolating+polynomial+calculator&lk=3
and get a graph like this

then use the interpolating polynomial of that graph:

and replace "x" with 8 and 9 to get an approximation of the next 2 numbers in series
However, since this is only a highly complicated estimate for a pattern that is probably way more simple, I'm rounding the equation up to thousands to match the previous 3 data sets:

80000, 312000

$0.13

1 vote

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acidyo (80) 6 years ago

Entry saved. I will reveal what the numbers mean a bit later, feel free to share this post with more participants in the mean time. :)

$0.16

3 votes

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nicholaslive (66) 6 years ago (edited)

@acidyo my best guess is that these numbers have to do with bitcoin

But I can't seem to find a correlation of where you got all 7 numbers from. Since these prices can not be separated by a fixed amount of time, it has to be either tied to days of high volume (seem to be very close) or total price changes of corrections (also very close)

$1.58

3 votes

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acidyo (80) 6 years ago

wow, you got very close to figuring out what they represented. I'll make an updated post soon explaining what exactly they meant and what people were guessing and the prizes involved. Thanks for taking the time to try and figure it out. :)

$0.12

2 votes

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nicholaslive (66) 6 years ago

@acidyo I’m glad! I definitely see the point your trying to make. Very creative!

$0.62

12 votes

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robertyan (63) 6 years ago (edited)

The "interpolating polynomial" method may not work since it can produce infinite solutions if you lift the orders of the polynomial functions. In Wolfram Alpha, if we input random 8th and 9th items, we can fit the sequence into another function.

The basic tricks of guessing the sequence number seem not working due to the 0s in the numbers. It does roughly look like an exponential curve in its trend, by looking at the graph. So it may look familiar as the growth of total-number-of-websites from 1990s, etc., but I didn't find the exactly matched numbers from sources like Steem witness, Bitcoin nodes, etc.

The intention of the author is the important key to get the "right" answer. With some hints in the question ("a unique competition"), it can be a good attempt to expect there're more context and meanings (e.g. mapping to some words) besides a pure numerical game. However, I'm sorry I didn't catch enough information with limited investigation. As long as I cannot read the minds of the author, I can only provide the rough guess based on the sequence itself.

Since the 900 in the sequence looks suspicious, I'm splitting the sequence into two, and some guess / fitting / prediction accordingly.

My guess is (9300, 57000)

$0.13

1 vote

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nicholaslive (66) 6 years ago

80380, 312380

quick google search showed there is a “cheat” to solve any number sequence using “interpolating polynomial” which I still don’t know what it is, but by entering the sequence into an online calculator it gave me the overly complicated but nevertheless correct formula: