in reply to Re: Rabbits
in thread Rabbits

That's the story behind that Fibonacci sequence. I forget the exact details, but many years ago Fibonacci was given this problem, "If I have two rabbits. . . " and the solution he found was, 1,1,2,3,5,8,.... It also gave me an image to use :). Another interesting thing is that things in nature, such as flowers, seem to show numbers relating to the sequence. Almost all flowers have a number of petals that is a number in the Fibonacci sequence :) (normally, pluck a few out, and I might be wrong ;).

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Re^3: Rabbits
by zejames (Hermit) on Nov 29, 2004 at 14:14 UTC

    Let's assume that each couple of rabbits give birth to two baby rabbits.

    Let's count the number of couple of rabbits. At the beginning, we've 1 couple of young rabbit

    F_1 = 1

    Next year, they'll be adult rabbits, but won't have children yet :

    F_2 = 1

    On the third year, they'll a two baby rabbits, that is one couple

    F_3 = 2

    On the forth year, the first parent will have two baby rabbits again, but young rabbits won't be old enough to do so

    F_3 = 2 + 1 = 3

    On the fifth year, we've got two couples that can have little rabbits and one that cannot :

    F_3 = 3 + 2 = 5

    and so on... Each year, the number of couple is :

    • the number of rabbits that lived the year before, that is F_{n-1}
    • plus the number of rabbits that were born that year, that is the number of couple old enough to proceate, that is F_{n-2}

    To conclude :

    F_n = F_{n-1} - F{n-2}

    Funny, isn't it ? Ok, that is not very realistic and very accurante, but who cares ? ;)


    --
    zejames
      That's one way of putting it :). I find it fun to play around with sequences and series, and perl is just an easy language to model them with. Thanks for the clear picture and explanation :), I understood the idea, but it is difficult for me to explain.
      Well, that's that clarified. The monthly thing was misleading me :)