Thread: This one might be tricky

This is for a game I play,

you can take a "som" of a person, it gives you a number, but the number is not 100% accurate it can be off by +/- 45%, there is no way to tell how far off it is with just 1 number.

You can take multiple "soms" to get 2, 3 or 4 numbers all off by different percents from the correct number.

the numbers can be off by 1% 4% 18% etc. but can not be off by something like 1.34% or 6.542%. They are off by whole percents.

The maximum error is 45%

Using this I think it should be possible to make a formula to figure out the correct answer given 3-4 numbers.

I wanted to work this into a spread sheet but I got a little stuck...

Help please

whoops this probably is in the wrong section, I am definitely in first year university

Can you shed some light on the actual writing of the question? It seems a bit ambiguous to me.

managed to get a spreadsheet up that does it, had to use arrays so had to get a bit of help on the programming end of things,

it ended up not being a math question at all really.

i think it would be something like

f(x)= x*b
f(x)= x*a

(a is a integer between +/- 1-45)
(b is a int between +/- 1-45)

solve for x, in some cases u needed a c, or even rarely a d. if b and a were equal ofc u get infinite results.

it was for a game where you arent supposed to figure out the exact number, so there is some uncertainty but using this spread sheet

Let be the unknown number. Say the first trial gives the value . Then we can conclude that is between

trial 2 gives a result of . Again:
is between . since we have information from the previous round about the interval in which could be, intersect the two intervals.

repeat.

But will this always terminate with a conclusion " must be..."??
No, since the number k could come up every single round and no new information is gained. If we require that a new number be given every single round then the worst case scenario is around rounds, since every integer in the interval might come up.

An interesting question is, what is the expected number of steps required for you to be 10% or 50% or 95% sure of the number?