Chapter 165 The Magic Square and the Upside-Down Pyramid
After the cat statue was combined with the stone slab, the statue's eyes lit up instantly. The stone slab on the ground began to shake rapidly, and the sand on it jumped up. Tom and Dr. Hunter quickly ran away from the stone slab and stood aside.
The floor tiles on the slate shook more and more violently, and eventually they scattered. The slate was originally one piece, but now there is a ten centimeter gap between each floor tile, and then the middle part of the floor tile slowly rises, forming a fifty-centimeter gap.
Centimeter-square small stone piers, and the entire floor tiles are in a "convex" shape. After the small stone piers were formed, they also underwent a series of dazzling changes: some cat statues appeared on each stone pier.
The number of statues on different stone piers is also different. The most is 9 and the least is only one. Some statues have a faint blue light in their eyes.
The statues vary in size, with three levels: large, medium and small. The small one is only about the size of a thumb, the medium one is as big as a palm, and the largest one is about as big as a forearm. The weirdest thing is that there are more than one of these cat statues.
Cat face.
Tom saw that these exquisite statues often had more than one cat face, and the largest statue had four faces.
"What does this mean?" Dr. Hunter looked puzzled. He put on his gloves and gently touched the stone pier, but he felt that the stone pier seemed to shake.
He increased his strength and actually turned the stone pier 90° - you know, such a large stone fifty centimeters square may weigh dozens of kilograms, but he actually changed its direction with a gentle push.
.
The change that surprised them even more was yet to come: the stone pier that Dr. Hunter pushed originally had only four kittens with no eyes. After pushing, the eyes of the kitten with only one face lit up.
.
Everyone:?
Dr. Hunter exerted force on his hand and pushed again. This time the eyes of the one-sided kitten went out, and the eyes of the double-sided kitten lit up. The cycle continued like this, from double-sided to three-sided, from three-sided to four-sided, and back to four-sided again.
Single sided.
Everyone looked at this mechanism and fell into deep thought.
"There are still 49 stone piers..." Hermione murmured to herself as she walked to the edge of the platform and drew a 7×7 square matrix on the sand with her fingers.
"Do you think the number of cat faces represents numbers?" Dr. Hunter rubbed his chin and said, "One face represents 1, two faces represents 2, and those larger cats represent larger numbers."
"But what are the numbers represented by these big cats?" Allen frowned.
Tom got closer and discovered a detail. The four cat paws of the medium-sized statue, two back paws and one front paw were very vaguely carved. He couldn't even see how many fingers there were, but the other front paw was carved
But it is extremely detailed, with the five fingers on it showing every detail.
Tom had a general idea. In order to test his conjecture, he found the largest statue, and found that, sure enough, the two front paws were carved very finely, and you could see that the fingers on the front paws were all stretched out - that is
It is commonly known as "cat claws blooming", and the back claws are very blurry. You can only see that they are cat claws, but you can't clearly see the number of fingers on them.
He shared this discovery with the members of the expedition team.
"I would venture to speculate, I think the medium-sized statue represents the number five, and the large-sized statue represents the number ten," Tom finally expressed his conclusion, pointing to the stone pier next to the stone pier pushed by Dr. Hunter.
, "I think this stone pier represents the number twelve."
There is a large statue on the stone pier, and the eyes of the double-sided cat statue light up. The large statue represents the number ten, the two-sided cat statue is two, and ten plus two is twelve.
Everyone fell into deep thought. It was Dr. Hunter who broke the silence first: "Let's write down these numbers first."
So everyone got busy, converting the lit statues into numbers one by one, and then filling them in the squares drawn by Hermione on the ground.
Soon, some numbers were filled in the square matrix on the ground.
【picture】
Hermione looked at the picture and felt familiar, "This seems to be a variation of a mathematical puzzle I saw -"
"The seventh-order magic square." Tom and Dr. Hunter said in unison.
The magic square is an extremely ancient number game called the magic square. Its rule is to fill in non-repeating numbers from 1 to N squares in sequence within an N×N grid. It requires the same row, same column and same diagonal.
The sum of the numbers on the line is equal.
"Seven lines are odd magic squares that can be solved using Robert's method." Dr. Hunter gave the solution. Seeing that everyone except Tom looked confused, he began to patiently explain this to everyone.
The so-called Robert's method.
This method can only solve magic squares of odd order, that is, magic squares with an odd number of grids in each row.
"There is a formula for this method: the numbers are centered in one line, fill in the holes one by one to the right, and then press back out of the table in the opposite direction. If the situation is special, the next line will be empty."
These four lines represent the four rules of Robber's Law:
1. The first number must be in the middle of the first line
2. Write the numbers in ascending order to the upper right corner in order
3. If the number exceeds the magic square, then place the number at the far end of the row or column
4. If there are special circumstances, such as there are already numbers in the upper right corner, then write the numbers downwards. It is also a special case that the top corner exceeds the magic square.
According to these four rules, they first looked at the fourth grid in the first row of the magic square and found that the stone pier there was in a dormant state, so they pushed it to wake it up and adjusted the number on it to 1.
Next, according to rule 2, the number 2 should be filled in to the upper right corner, but the upper right corner is already out of place, so according to rule 3, 2 will be placed at the bottom of the line.
In this way, Tom and the others filled up all the forty-nine grids, so that the sum of the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in the square array was 175. When the last number "49" was filled in, the sandy land
Something has changed again...
First there was a dull loud noise, and then the entire sand began to tremble. The level of the sand dropped rapidly, and even formed a huge whirlpool, as if someone had pulled the plug out of a reservoir filled with water.
The sand disappeared quickly, no one knew where they went, and the stone walls on the edge of the sand gradually appeared. In less than a minute, the sand emptied, and the space under the sand shocked everyone: they looked down
I went there and saw a blue sky.
"Merlin..."
"God..."
"God..."
"Damn it..."
Different identities and different beliefs, but they all chose to express the most sincere sighs. What was happening in front of them was beyond their knowledge - even the two wizards present were no exception.
After looking away from the sky, they saw a white pyramid standing under the dome.