The Day of the Draw at Hogwarts

After the cat statue was combined with the stone slab, the statue's eyes lit up instantly. The stone slab on the ground began to shake rapidly, and the sand on it also jumped up. Tom and Dr. Hunter ran away from the stone slab and stood aside.

The tiles on the stone floor shook more and more violently, and eventually they scattered. It was originally a single stone slab, but now there is a ten centimeter gap between each floor tile, and then the middle part of the floor tile slowly rises, forming a small stone pier fifty centimeters square, and the entire floor tile is in a "convex" shape. After the small stone piers were formed, they also underwent a series of dazzling changes: some cat statues appeared on each stone pier.

The number of statues on different stone piers is also different. The most is 9 and the least is only one. Some statues have a faint blue light in their eyes.

The statues vary in size, with three levels: large, medium and small. The small one is only about the size of a thumb, the medium one is as big as a palm, and the largest one is about as big as the forearm. The weirdest thing is that these cat statues have more than one cat face on them.

Tom saw that these exquisite statues often had more than one cat face, and the largest statue had four faces.

"What does this mean?" Dr. Hunter looked puzzled. He put on his gloves and gently touched the stone pier, but he felt that the stone pier seemed to shake.

He increased his strength and actually turned the stone pier 90° - you know, such a large stone fifty centimeters square may weigh dozens of kilograms, but he actually changed its direction with a gentle push. .

The change that surprised them even more was yet to come: the kitten with only four eyes that did not light up on the stone pier that Dr. Hunter pushed, the eyes of the kitten with only one face lit up. .

Everyone:?

Dr. Hunter exerted force on his hands and pushed again. This time the eyes of the one-sided kitten went out, and the eyes of the double-sided kitten lit up. The cycle continued, from double-sided to three-sided, from three-sided to four-sided, and back to four-sided again. Single sided.

Everyone looked at this mechanism and fell into deep thought.

"There are still 49 stone piers..." Hermione murmured to herself as she walked to the edge of the platform and drew a 7×7 square matrix on the sand with her fingers.

"Do you think the number of cat faces represents numbers?" Dr. Hunter rubbed his chin and said, "One face represents 1, two faces represents 2, and those larger cats represent larger numbers."

"But what are the numbers represented by these big cats?" Allen frowned.

Tom got closer and discovered a detail. The four cat paws of the medium-sized statue. The two back paws and one front paw were carved very vaguely. It was not even clear how many fingers there were, but the other front paw was carved But it is extremely detailed, with the five fingers on it showing every detail.

Tom had a rough idea. In order to verify his conjecture, he found the largest statue, and found that, sure enough, the two front paws were carved very finely, and you could see that the fingers on the front paws were all stretched out - commonly known as "cat's claws blooming" , and the back paws are very blurry. It can only be seen that they are cat paws, but the number of fingers on them cannot be clearly seen.

He shared this discovery with the members of the expedition.

"I would hazard a guess, and I think the medium-sized statue represents the number five, and the large-sized statue represents the number ten," Tom finally came to his conclusion, pointing to the stone pier next to the one pushed by Dr. Hunter. , "I think this stone pier represents the number twelve."

There is a large statue on the stone pier, and the eyes of the double-sided cat statue light up. The large statue represents the number ten, the two-sided cat statue is two, and ten plus two is twelve.

Everyone fell into deep thought. It was Dr. Hunter who broke the silence first: "Let's write down these numbers first."

So everyone got busy, converting the lit statues into numbers one by one, and then filling them in the squares drawn by Hermione on the ground.

Soon, some numbers were filled in the square matrix on the ground.

【picture】

Hermione looked at the picture and felt familiar, "This seems to be a variation of a mathematical puzzle I saw -"

"Seventh level magic square." Tom and Dr. Hunter said in unison.

The magic square is an extremely ancient number game called the magic square. Its rule is to fill in an N×N square with non-repeating numbers from 1 to N squares in sequence. It requires the same row, same column and same diagonal. The sum of the numbers on the line is equal.

"Seven lines are odd magic squares that can be solved using Robert's method." Dr. Hunter gave the solution. Seeing that everyone except Tom looked confused, he began to patiently explain the so-called Robert's method to everyone.

This method can only solve magic squares of odd order, that is, magic squares with an odd number of grids in each row.

"There is a formula for this method: the numbers are centered in the row, fill in the holes one by one to the right, and then press back out of the table in the opposite direction. If the situation is special, the next one will be empty."

These four lines represent the four rules of Robber's Law:

1. The first number must be in the middle of the first line

2. Write the numbers in ascending order to the upper right corner in order

3. If the number exceeds the magic square, then place the number at the far end of the row or column

4. If there are special circumstances, such as there are already numbers in the upper right corner, then write the numbers downward. It is also a special case that the top corner exceeds the magic square.

According to these four rules, they first looked at the fourth grid in the first row of the magic square and found that the stone pier there was in a dormant state, so they pushed it to wake it up and adjusted the number on it to 1. Next, according to rule two, the number 2 should be filled in to the upper right corner, but the upper right corner is already out of place, so according to rule three, 2 will be placed at the bottom of the line.

With this operation, Tom and the others filled up all forty-nine grids, so that the sum of the horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines in the square array was 175. When the final number "49" was filled in, the sand changed again.

First there was a dull loud noise, and then the entire sand began to tremble. The level of the sand dropped rapidly, and even formed a huge whirlpool, as if the plug had been pulled out of a reservoir full of water.

The sand disappeared quickly, no one knew where it went, and the stone walls on the edge of the sand gradually appeared. In less than a minute, the sand emptied, and the space under the sand shocked everyone: when they looked down, they saw a blue sky.

"Merlin..."

"Oh, God……"

"God..."

"Damn it..."

Different identities and different beliefs, but they all chose to express the most sincere sighs. Everything in front of them was beyond their knowledge - even the two wizards present were no exception.

After looking away from the sky, they saw a white pyramid standing under the dome.

Asking for a monthly ticket. Please vote for recommendations. There was a burglary attack at 3 o'clock yesterday morning. I will notify you in advance next time.