I enjoy tasks that exhaust a finite supply of things in order to make some kind of interesting structure. Here, a finite supply of toothpicks (250 of them) are exhausted to make a pyramid. (Or consider the finite fencing around Pixel Pattern.)
At some point I’d like to test out the hypothesis that removing the finiteness would make the video a lot less perplexing on the whole. In other words, we wouldn’t be as perplexed by a guy plugging away at a pyramid with an inexhaustible supply of toothpicks. We’re perplexed because we know, at the end of the video, that he’s done and we want to know what the pyramid looks like.
Here’s the task page.
Here are several interesting questions that popped up at 101questions:
- Alison: How many rows in the end?
- Hope Gerson: How many toothpicks does it take to make the next sized equilateral triangle?
- Douglas Moore: How many triangles?
- Matthew Clark: What’s the perimeter of the final triangle?
- Scott Westwell: How many small (3 toothpick) triangles can be made?
- Jeff de Verona: How many “total” triangles will be created (any size)?
- Gregory Taylor: How long did it actually take to go through the entire stack?