h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

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Greebs..xx

441

Me does need a reason why you choose that number DD...

Greebs..xx

Apart from the fact that on second looks it is wrong i went

100 10 squared
121 11 squared
144 12 squared
here it falls down with 202 and 244
400 was 20 squared and leads to
441 21 sqaured.

Spent 14.5 minutes of my coffee break on this.

1210

100 = 100 in base 10
121 = 100 in base 9
144 = 100 in base 8
etc
400 = 100 in base 5

Hence

1210 100 in base 4

Phew!

What DD said... although it's all a little too base(ic) for me.

shazz

Shazz I knew you'd be right on my tails. My first idea worked on skim reading but then fell so badly apart on looking back at it.

~Groan~

That's terrible Shazz!!!

Greebs..xx

*Ripper belatedly gets the same answer as Shazz and DD: 1210 for being 100 in descending bases. Ripper wonders if he gets bonus marks for the next two in the sequence being 10201 and 1100100 (100 in bases 3 and 2).*

Here's a question... what's the tenth value in the sequence? Is it a hundred 1's (written tally style, with fun gates and such), or a 1 followed by ninety-nine zeroes (a 1 in the hundreds place?

No... can't be, just as there's no numeral for 10 in base 10, or numeral for 3 in base 3, there can't be a numeral 1 in base 1... so it'd have to be loads of zeroes either way.

Hmm. I can make chains out of loads of zeroes, but not gates...

I went to a maths lab to figure this one out, but I got locked in by the evil janitor.

Never the less, I worked hard and have come up with what I believe to be the correct answer. The answer is . . . 3, as it is the only number which can create a good anti-climax.

I seem to recall that 42 was an even bigger anti-climax to a rather important question.

The next number is 421.

The are obviously the route-numbers of the buses which did not turn up at their termini on the morning of July 17th 1973 due to the wrong type of discarded take-away wrappers being strewn across the streets.

Can I point out that the 14.5 minutes that DD wasted of his coffee break work out as 16.4 minutes in Base 8?

B

And if you want to justify it to your boss, you only wasted 9.0625 minutes in hexadecimal.

Considering the break is my own time I'd reather keep it as big as possible under the parameters of the maximum allowance quantified by the time accoutnacy department. This being allocated as a time not exceeding one ninety sixth of a global rotation.