Challenge posts will always contain spoilers
Don’t reverse-engineer this one…
If you looked at today’s and said, “What?”, you’re not alone. We’re going to explore 2 paths to today’s answer.
Path 1
For many, the 1st thought was to graph this equation or solve it. Graphing turns out to be the correct answer, but this is just not a simple equation to graph. To be honest, it’s too long. Fellow student, Daniel Teller, provided us with this inverse graphing calculator which lets you input text and get out an equation.
For example “test” gives
and the equation
We can start typing in letters and brute force solving this by trying to match the equation to Stella’s. This gives us “snahrevelc”, which is “cleverhans” backwards. But Stella said NOT to reverse-engineer. We’ll take the first half of that.
The link is stl.la/snahrevelc.
Path 2
Let’s look for some math-based hoaxes. This approach led student, Doreen Sheridan, to Clever Hans, a horse who was said to be able to solve math. This was, appropriately, a hoax. stl.la/cleverhans goes nowhere, so maybe we should reverse it.
Doing so gives stl.la/snahrevelc.