Bonus Post! Collatz Conjecture

I definitely suggest you look at the large version.

Actionscript, of course, is a programming language. And one thing computers and programming languages do much more efficiently than humans is...well...compute! We can use this to our advantage and help display very complex math problems nearly instantly. Flash is a wonderful tool to use in eLearning in that the behind-the-scenes number crunching can easily be reflected graphically.

In this case, I stumbled upon something called the Collatz Conjecture. It's a conjecture that basically says that if you start with an integer, you check to see if it's even or odd. If it's even, divide by 2. If it's odd, multiply it by 3 and add 1. Repeat that over and over, and you will ALWAYS wind up with a value of 1.

With larger numbers, this process could take quite a while...so...enter Flash! Simply type in a number you want to check (I've limited it to 8 digits) and click "Go!" to quickly see the resulting path to 1.