> Basically, take the numbers 1/3, -1/3, and count how many terms you need to produce something that sums to a whole number.

Any whole number of terms greater than 1 will allow this, by the way.

> Basically, take the numbers 1/3, -1/3, and count how many terms you need to produce something that sums to a whole number.

Shouldn't there be +2/3 and -2/3 charges as well? Otherwise the only way to do this is with an equal number of +1/3 and -1/3 charges (so not 5 total, for example).

You can get five with (1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 - 1/3). Note that I'm not really talking about charges directly so they don't need to be equal, but rather I'm using these numbers as a proxy for charges. So this configuration might be something like (red, green, blue, red, antired).

It's just a quick rule for showing how many quarks can fit together, not what kinds of quarks they are.

> You can get five with (1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 + 1/3 - 1/3).

I'm sorry; although you very clearly referred to winding up with a whole number, I somehow read it as winding up with 0.