Hethu's Techno Babble

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Google math problem

I saw this interesting news article about mysterious billboards showing a mathematical problem.


The billboard simply says:
{ the first 10-digit prime in consecutive digits of e }.com
and it's up to you to figure out the rest.

Now I'm not a mathematical genius to figure this out, but I was yet interested to find the answer anyways. The obvious and the easiest is to Google for it, and I ended up with this nicely written answer by Marcus Kazmierczak.

In case you are too lazy to visit that link, here's a brief explanation:
e is the base of the natural system of logarithms, having a numerical value of about 2.71828 (though the number goes on forever). Now the prime number that matches the billboard criteria is 7427466391. So following the billboard problem, once you visit 7427466391.com you end up with this:

Congratulations. You've made it to level 2. Go to www.Linux.org and enter Bobsyouruncle as the login and the answer to this equation as the password.

f(1)= 7182818284
f(2)= 8182845904
f(3)= 8747135266
f(4)= 7427466391
f(5)= __________

Woa... another math problem.

So what’s the reward when you figure this out? It turns out to be a marketting pitch to hire smart engineeres for the Google Labs. Google doing its tricks again!

Since you are at it, also check out this hilarious Google's Luna center jobs!

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