Thanks for all your help. By the way, the original problem that started me thinking about this was one of the puzzles given at the MoMath masters tournament last week:
Imagine a two-player "game", where player A takes a number (integer), doubles it, and passes it to player B, who adds 50 and passes it back to player A. The first player to name a number greater than 1000 loses. If A starts the game by passing an initial number to B, what's the lowest number A can give that guarantees a win? Regards, Johann ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
