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Sunday, 23 August 2009 |
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 As we eat a fair few minties at work, i decided that we should be able to recreate the Minties cartoon sequence. It was a little more tricky than i first anticipated because after a short time i realised that although the same cartoons would appear, the adjacent cartoon would be different on some wrappers. I remember seeing a blog where someone else found the same thing and then threw the idea into the too hard basket.
Of coarse there must be an explanation. I toyed with the idea that there could be multiple rolls and that i would need to do a statistical analysis and calculate the probability of multiple rolls. I then had the idea that maybe there could be a single roll with duplicate cartoons and so i set to prove my single roll theory. If i could make a single chain out of the wrappers, that loops and uses all the cartoons then it would be true; else there would be cartoons left over proving there are multiple rolls.
I suspected that a tally of each cartoon sighting should be similar except for duplicates which should be seen more frequently. After making a successful sequence using all the cartoons, I tried taking a subset of the sequence to try and make more than one repeating sequence that includes all the cartoons and could not find a way.
I now conclude that there are 18 cartoons on the roll with the diagonal edge pattern. There are 3 duplicate cartoons which leaves 15 unique cartoons on the roll.
Update 17 Jan 2010: Barry Mitchell has challenged my single roll theory, calling it an 'Official Challenge'. In do so, he presented me with a solution using the same wrappers but splitting the sequence into two separate rolls. The solution looks to be valid to me and is more likely to be the real sequences since the horizontal pattern has two rolls as well.
I haven't scanned the horizontal wrappers yet.
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My original solution |
Barry's more likely solution
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End of first sequence
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Start of second sequence
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