9,73,241,561,1081,1849,_?_

Re:9,73,241,561,1081,1849,_?_ by jacobolus on Thursday November 05, 2009 @08:06PM (#925191)

How does that work? Like this? That's not really following the "pattern" though, which is to keep adding 1 down the left edge of the triangle. Choosing to put a 0 in because we ran out of terms in our series is pretty arbitrary.

    1  2  4  8 16 31
     1  2  4  8  15
       1  2  4  7
        1  2  3
          1  1
           0

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Re:9,73,241,561,1081,1849,_?_ by req2 on Thursday November 05, 2009 @11:51PM (#925448)

Difference tables don't operate on a "pattern"- they simply take the difference of the two terms above.

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Re:9,73,241,561,1081,1849,_?_ by jacobolus on Friday November 06, 2009 @03:37AM (#925693)

No, but the point is that using a difference table to find the "next term" in a sequence is rather stupid if the difference table doesn't terminate until you run out of terms.... the implication of that is that you have a sequence which cannot actually be fully described via that difference table.

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