4 ms·
On a white board at work a while back, someone had drawn pictures of a few little things like flowers, houses, people. Next to each was a number, like "3 flowe
by pugworthy 8y ago
On a white board at work a while back, someone had drawn pictures of a few little things like flowers, houses, people. Next to each was a number, like "3 flowers".
Then someone wrote, "The sum of all numbers on this board is 15"
Then 15 got crossed out and replaced by "30"
And so on. You can see where this goes.
Anyway reading this, seems that self-enumerating sentences that tell you the sum of all numbers in the sentence aren't possible, unless there is just 1 number, or all zeros, or balanced positive and negative numbers that sum to zero.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- schoen 8y agoIt could work if you allow arithmetic operators and/or their English names, or if you allow any ways of naming numbers other than with their decimal digits alone. A simple example might be: "4 flowers, 4 cats, 4 dogs. The sum of all the numbers on this board is 4 squared." Or: "4 flowers, 4 cats, 2 dogs. The sum of all the numbers on this board is 4²."