The puzzle we left you with before our summer break was:
What is the next number in the sequence: 10, 9, 60, 90, 70, 66...
If you came up with the answer 96, you were so close to the best answer; or a long way off depending how you look at it! You clearly got the key that each entry in the sequence had an increasing number of letters 10 = TEN = 3 Letters 9 = NINE = 4 Letters 60 = SIXTY = 5 Letters 90 = NINETY = 6 Letters 70 = SEVENTY = 7 Letters 66 = SIXTY SIX = 8 Letters So clearly the answer must be a number with 9 letters – so why not 96 = NINETY SIX? Consider the first number in the sequence. It has 3 Letters, so why not 1 or 2 or 6? Well, 10 is bigger than all of these so what we need is the biggest number with the right number of letters. A 9-letter number bigger than 96. To be fair, you have to go a LOT bigger than 96. A googol is the name of a number that is 1 followed by 100 zeros (interestingly it was also intended as the name of a well-know search engine but when searching available domain names they got the spelling wrong!) So ONE GOOGOL would work – except there is just one more TEN GOOGOL is the best answer we know. Now back to work….
