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A comment on A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving. Parent comment

Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by benihana on Thursday July 02, 2015 @12:59PM (#9820126)
I was just writing this out! I believe practice in unit testing is what let me get this question right. I almost submitted n^1, n^2, n^3 before I realized I didn't get any wrong answers and something didn't feel right. I credit this 'instinct' to having written thousands of tests, and trying to make them fail to make sure my tests weren't lying to me.
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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by Natsu on Thursday July 02, 2015 @08:40PM (#9822683)
It's funny. Even though I got the right answer, looking back, I still see many holes in my tests. I only tested positive and negative integers. I didn't even think to try fractions, decimals, hex values, text, etc. and I was already expecting a confirmation bias test.
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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by LoSboccacc on Thursday July 02, 2015 @01:58PM (#9820504)
got tricked even if I tested 1, 1, 1
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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by tjohns on Thursday July 02, 2015 @05:13PM (#9821676)
1, 1, 1 was actually the test case that clued me in that n^1, n^2, n^3 couldn't be the right solution.
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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by tikhonj on Thursday July 02, 2015 @09:31PM (#9822885)
n=1?

But I totally see why it would cause you to pause and rethink your original idea :).

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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by techonup on Thursday July 02, 2015 @10:21PM (#9823032)
The point is that it didn't work, so exponentiation was out the window.
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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by tikhonj on Friday July 03, 2015 @01:08AM (#9823621)
My point was that 1,1,1 is 1^1,1^2,1^3 and actually fits the pattern :).
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Re:A Quick Puzzle to Test Your Problem Solving by firethief on Friday July 03, 2015 @01:57AM (#9823774)
Right - by fitting the pattern but failing the actual criterion, it disproves the consecutive exponents hypothesis.
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