Gates even requested a piece of paper so that he could “think better”. Returning to the impromptu competition organized by Gilroy, after a while Bill Gates was the only player left among those who had not chosen to give up from discouragement and/or despair that they had not yet discerned the secret.
When a player is able to give the correct answer for six consecutive rolls, he or she is considered to have successfully resolved the challenge.No player can make any mention of the method tested, either correct or failed.There is no limit to the number of rolls needed to reach the solution.The aim is to deduce the rule that governs the game (and to know the answer before the master announces it).Each move consists of rolling five dice, after which the introducer or “master” of the game announces the result.The name of the game is “Petals around the rose” and this name is significant.The rules of the game, which only requires five dice, cannot be simpler: It was Gilroy himself, during the tedious wait in the airport on the return trip from the National Computer Conference in Dallas, who introduced the problem and challenged the gathered computer experts from Microsoft and MIT to solve it. What we do have documented is the exact moment that it acquired its legendary status, thanks to an account of the episode that Henry Gilroy gave in the September-October 1977 edition of Personal Computing magazine. Apparently, it was invented sometime in the 1970s in the mathematics department of the University of Southern California, though in some forums it has even been suggested that it’s a version of a game devised in the court of Genghis Khan. And the origin of the game is just as enigmatic. The goal is to deduce the algorithm, the formula that transforms each set of five dice into the number. Since then, the game, known as “ Petals around the rose“, has become a sort of legendary initiatory test for computer-geeks. Is this new? Well, almost forty years ago a similar problem, game or puzzle tested the logic and inductive capacity of some of the most promising American computer specialists of the time, including Paul Allen and Bill Gates, whom the challenge put in check. A novel logical-mathematical problem featuring equations where the different terms are flowers, has become popular in China and from there, through social networks, has engaged thousands of people in half the world.
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