5 ms·

> The joke about robot overlords still pondering on BB This starts to sound like Hitchhiker's Guide to Galaxy. I always thought the answer 42 was just an absur

• perl4ever 5y ago
  The word on this, I believe, is: 'The first strong law of small numbers (Gardner 1980, Guy 1988, 1990) states "There aren't enough small numbers to meet the many demands made of them." The second strong law of small numbers (Guy 1990) states that "When two numbers look equal, it ain't necessarily so."' '...the first few values of the interpolating polynomial (n^4-6n^3+23n^2-18n+24)/24 (erroneously given in Guy (1990) with a coefficient 24 instead of 23) for n=1, 2, ... are 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, .... Thus, the polynomial appears to give the powers of 2, but then continues 31, 57, 99, ... (OEIS A000127). In fact, this sequence gives the maximal number of regions obtained by joining n points around a circle by chords' https://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrongLawofSmallNumbers.html https://mathworld.wolfram.com/StrongLawofSmallNumbers.html