If only self-belief was a storable energy source.

Yeah, but the "teen" is fixed, all numbers between 13 and 19 end with those four letters and "eigh" is not a positive integer. So I don't agree that 8teen is a valid answer.

Omitting fifteen was the clue that it was not a simple numeric sequence so it was obvious that it was not just going to be the next number in the sequence and they were going to jump one or more numbers for the same reason.

Interesting on the 'teen' one.

You have:

4teen
6teen
7teen

Now 8teen would not follow this sequence, but 8een does, and also has a valid reason for no 5. They specifically answered 8een, not 8teen which did follow a sequence of numbers within numbers, but not numbers followed by teen

So, they had the right kind of idea, a workable sequence, with the same validation for there being no number 5. If it was me, I'd have cut them some slack.


On another note, the jury one was a pretty rubbish answer.

I had 8een but for a completely different reason:-

14 You are allowed to buy a soft drink in a bar
16 You are allowed to have sex
17 You are allowed to drive
18 You are allowed to vote

For some bizarre reason I didnt even consider a pure number sequence

yes i did know the sequence would ignore Fifteen before they revealed it - thats HOW you get five points in that round!

Anyway, yf you can provide an answer that fits the clues shown, that could be a valid sequence, they do allow it.

8teen is a valid answer for the previous three clues, with a valid sequence, they should have accepted it.

The clues are:

4teen
6teen
7teen

If the team answered 9teen, then Victoria could easily have said "thats a wrong answer", and stated the reason that they are "teen" numbers that contain actual numbers in them.

FOURteen
SIXteen
SEVENteen
EIGHTeen

They all have words for single digit numbers in them, where as FIFteen doesnt contain the word "FIVE".

Only Connect got this question wrong, it is ambiguous.

Quite often the setters mess up.

I'm claiming my 4 five point answers this week.

Not at all right by your own written reasoning:

4teen = four-teen
6teen = six-teen
7teen = seven-teen
but
8teen does not equal eight-teen, it is eight-een...

So the next answer can only be

9teen

Like I said, and you have agreed, the clues were 4teen, etc. There is no such number as "eigh". Your answer is wrong, so no 5 points.

I'm sorry, but they are teen numbers that contain single digit numbers too. It's a reasonable and valid explanation.

If I was right and you were wrong, we could be having this argument in reverse. This is what makes it an ambiguous question

They may be teen numbers that contain single digit numbers too, but it is not a reasonable and valid explanation.

4teen = Fourteen
6teen = Sixteen
7teen = Seventeen
8teen = Eightteen
9teen = Nineteen

Spot which one of the above is not a correct spelling of a number and thus doesn't fit the sequence. You can't suddenly change the sequence to 8een just to justify your answer.

We just have 2 valid answers.

If you cannot understand that, that's fine by me.

That's fine by me too if you can't understand that you can't change the question to suit your (in)valid answer!

I think you are all missing a subtlety here....

They answered 8een, not 8teen. The sequence they were claiming was that they were all numbers that contained other numbers (as opposed to they were all numbers that formed other numbers when suffixed by -teen)

No, I am not missing that subtlety, I mentioned it in an earlier post. The point is, all others in the sequence were a number followed by "teen", so "8een" does not fit the sequence as it is not a number followed by "teen".

Let's call in OCWriter to adjudicate!

Yes, but until the last answer was revealed, 4teen, 6teen, 7teen and 8een was also a perfectly good sequence.

It's a bit like a sequence starting Harold Wilson, Ted Heath, Jim Callaghan, you answer Margaret Thatcher and being told that it is John Major as the sequence is all male PMs. Both are sequences, and as long as you explain a rationale and are on mostly the right lines, I think some adjudication should be possible.

According to ocwriter last week you can change the question, or at least the second and third clues, to fit your own answer.

This was a stupid sequence with no significance in reality at all. Badly thought out.

8een as a valid answer only works if it is assumed that the t that is dropped comes from "teen" and not "eight". I think that that is a very dodgy assumption given that all other numbers between 13 and 19 end in "teen". Why should 18 be any different? The numbers as a group are referred to as the "teens", not the "teens and eens".

Yes but then 4een, 6een and 7een don't, well, unless you have a really broad cockney accent anyway.

So the answer people are arguing about only follows the sequence if you make every other entry in the sequence different. That's a pretty good definition of 'doesn't follow the sequence' to me.

It really isn't. There's no particular reason why "teen" should have to appear in the fourth element, just because it appears in the other three, if there's a logical sequence that doesn't require it. That would not be a category error.

Apart from the fact that we were explicitly told that was the answer, no. Some people might consider that important but obviously you know better.

Good grief.

Probably keeping his head down!

Oh dear, the old pub quiz chestnut. It may be right but it's not what's written down here so I can't give you the mark. Move on, please.

Your thought process is too restricted. You need to think more laterally and forget they are words, rather than just a string of letters in a clue. There's no reason all the letters have to reappear again.

The sequence fourteen sixteen seventeen eighteen, broken down like that as successive appearances of integers within longer integers, is just as valid as fourteen sixteen seventeen nineteen, like that.

The problem is that nobody will ever have thought of these as sequences outside of the context of this programme, and there's no physical significance to either of them, so it is purely arbitrary which one you prefer.

Last week ocwriter said he thought it was OK to pretend that the second clue in the sequence was "E.g. John hannah" rather than just "John Hannah", so obviously anything goes now.

Hello Charlie Brown!

As I said, ocwriter has said it's ok to change the other clues to fit a logical sequence, so you obviously know better than him.

My life!!!