Thursday, May 15, 2008

Round 262

Date Released: May 15th, 2008.
Date Rewarded: May 22nd, 2008.

A Chomby was walking down a path one day when Jhudora appeared in front of it. "Solve this puzzle, and you may pass," she said.

How many people did not properly follow the instructions on last week's Lenny Conundrum, and submitted more than a single word when the Conundrum specifically required a one-word answer?

Please round to the nearest 50, and please submit only a number, otherwise you will be disqualified like all those people from last week.


Prize


Rules to Rule By

Click to show/hide solution
It's just a guessing game basically. You can guess number in 50 increment: 0, 50, 100, 150, 200, 250... The answer is 750.

Results: 180 people guessed the correct answer earning themselves 11112 NP each.

17 comments:

Unknown said...

this is just a guessign game like the guess the weight of the marrow game. i put 3500.
only 3473 people guessed it right last week. so i guessed that number rounded up by 50.
let me know what you guess and if you ge tit rigth next wednesday.

LC Solver said...

I guessed 650 but it's just a guess so don't go with my answer unless you like it too :)

Unknown said...

on round 201 they wanted to know the same thing:

Round: 201
How many people answered last week's Lenny Conundrum incorrectly? Please round to the nearest 1000.
Answer: 35000

so i figure since they wanted it rounded to 1000, this week they want it rounded to 50. 1000/50= 200. take 35000/200= 1750. might be a good guess too.

LC Solver said...

Thanks for your comments. I checked that question, it said the number of people answered incorrectly.

But your analysis is good (something to start with)

Sabeel Hakim said...

Correct answers in Round 200 gave 170 NP. 2000000/170 = 11765 users answered correctly.

Unfortunately, 35000 answered incorrectly, but this number is rounded to the nearest thousand which will throw off this result, somewhat.

We can determine an upperbound and lowerbound (not necessarily the right bounds to this problem :P) by considering the two extremes of Round 200: 34500 and 35499.

We now have a right-to-wrong ratio within bounds to compare to this weeks round, in which we know that 3473 guessed correctly.

Assuming this ratio holds constant for Rounds 200 and 261, we have:

34500/11765 = x/3473 (lower)
35499/11765 = x/3473 (upper)

where x is the number of incorrect guesses for Round 261. Solving for x gives:

x = 34500/11765*3473 = 10184 (lower)
x = 35499/11765*3473 = 10479 (upper)

This gives, the following possible answers: 10150, 10200, 10250, 10300, 10350, 10400, 10450, and 10500.

However, it is VERY likely that the ratio will not hold, especially since the difficulties of the rounds may vary and the number of participants per round may vary, among other variables.

LC Solver said...

Thanks for your analysis, NSurveyor. However, this is the number of people answered more than one words, not number of people entered wrong answers.

Also someone posted the answer on the Neopets board last week which can totally messed up the ratio.

The "resolution" analysis that Jennifer suggested doesn't depends on any above things so I think it's a good guess.

Sabeel Hakim said...

Oi, I see that now >.<
Perhaps I shall just guess randomly.

LC Solver said...

check out Jennifer analysis (also posted in the hints) so you may have something to guess :)

Sabeel Hakim said...

Hmmm, I don't follow the reasoning of Jennifer's second hint. Why start with 35000? Why divide by 1000 (merely because it was rounded to the thousands?) and then multiply by 50 (merely because it is to be rounded to the nearest fifty)?

The upperbound, 10500, I found still holds, as the number of incorrect multiword guesses is surely less than the number of incorrect guesses. Heh, not at all helpful though.

LC Solver said...

it's like significant figure. Once the number is big, you want to round it to a big figure but if your number is small you want to round to smaller number.

for ex. if the number 35,343,343 you may want to round to the nearest 1,000,000 so that the people who enter may have chance to guess it right than just round to the nearest 1,000. Who could guess it's 35,343,000 :)

Anonymous said...

i guessed 1950 but if it's 1750 i'll slap myself

Unknown said...

"11765 users answered correctly.

Unfortunately, 35000 answered incorrectly"

you just gave me information that might help with the guesses. 35000+11765=46765 users who guessed all together in the LC.

11765/46765= %25.15 of people guess correctly. which means %74.85 guess wrong.

but we want to know who guessed more than one word. not who guessed wrong. just something to play with if you want to try and find some kind of equation for the LC.

Slayde said...

What if...
Did it even allow people to submit an answer of more than one word? Maybe if you tried, it would say "Error: Please submit a one word answer." *Gasp*

LC Solver said...

lolz Sam, I think they allow you to submit more than one word. :)

... but I don't wanna try

dommi said...

I just had a thought after reading your posts and then rereading the question.

After the question it says: "Please round to the nearest 50, and please submit only a number, otherwise you will be disqualified like all those people from last week."

What if there is a filter that filters out 2 word answers and just deletes them? If this were so, then the answer should be 0, because the filter weeded the multiple word answers out.

Also, I know that you can answer with 2 words because I did that on my first or second one and obviously got it wrong.

And Jennifer, did you realize that the answer you got from the calculation is exactly half what you guessed for the answer 3500/2 = 1750

LC Solver said...

good point there dommi. We don't really know the answer so any guess could be right (or wrong).

However, the chance for answer 0 would be rare (if there is a filter, there is still a number of people who enter with more than 1 word, just TNT didn't need to read them with the filter and the filter can count too).

However, if the answer is 0, it is a tricky one (in case less than 25 people enter it)

Zainab said...

i guessed 750 without any analysis or reasoning :D just a number that popped into my head. haha.
i figured there had to end in 50 as tnt found it worth mentioning that the number needs to be rounded to that.