Friday, April 03, 2020
Can You Solve the Sea Monster Riddle?
This riddle starts off with a rollicking story of monsters and magic, and then gets into math. There's some logic, too, but it's really about math. While the answer is pretty darn cool, it wouldn't work if the numbers were the least bit different. Sure, sea monsters and floating cities are fantastical, but what really defies logic in this story is that they could keep chests full of pearls around for a thousand years without someone stealing any. That part is truly preposterous.
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The technique proposed for Atlantartica's ruler also would (very probably) not work if the ancients used a number system that was not base 10 ... and (very probably) not work if the ancient's notation did not rely on a "positional system" (where a numeral's position within the number consistently indicates a power of the base number; Roman numeral notation does not) ...
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