I think I smell a Rat
pow #7: Rat Population
PROBLEM:
After scampering on a ship two rats are transported to a deserted island where everything they need to survive thrives at their disposal. In celebration (and ‘cause they are rats) they celebrate a little too hard and have a litter of 6 rats, 3 being female and 3 being male, this process is repeated every 40 days. After 120 days the female rats begin to breed resulting in more babies. In a normal calendar year how many rats will there be by the end.
PROCESS AND SOLUTION:
I began this problem by just counting all the Newborns of each week and just counting the newborns as they went. But eventually there was a problem in that I forgot to count the babies all the other rats were also having. To organize the data and be able to actually find all the rats I created a table with six sections. One for the day cycle, the Newborns, the 40 year-olds, the 80 year olds the 120 year-olds (breeders) and the total amount of rats. Each cycle I put in the newborns and moving each number down the list, slowly adding them to the breeders and totals. To do this I used a formal that was (D (breeders) /2) multipled by 6 to get the new A (newborns) spot. Eventually I had this:
After the 9th and final cycle of year one there were 1808 rats on the island.
SELF-ASSESSMENT:
Personally I am very confident that my answer is correct because of many reasons. TO get to my final answer I went through three different ways of trying to solve it (documenting two), perfecting the formula every time. I also compared my answer with that of my teacher and my peers seeing if there was a consensus of answers between all of us. I organized my problem incredibly well and made a process that was easy to follow creating a higher chance to either find a problem in the process or getting more accurate.
After scampering on a ship two rats are transported to a deserted island where everything they need to survive thrives at their disposal. In celebration (and ‘cause they are rats) they celebrate a little too hard and have a litter of 6 rats, 3 being female and 3 being male, this process is repeated every 40 days. After 120 days the female rats begin to breed resulting in more babies. In a normal calendar year how many rats will there be by the end.
PROCESS AND SOLUTION:
I began this problem by just counting all the Newborns of each week and just counting the newborns as they went. But eventually there was a problem in that I forgot to count the babies all the other rats were also having. To organize the data and be able to actually find all the rats I created a table with six sections. One for the day cycle, the Newborns, the 40 year-olds, the 80 year olds the 120 year-olds (breeders) and the total amount of rats. Each cycle I put in the newborns and moving each number down the list, slowly adding them to the breeders and totals. To do this I used a formal that was (D (breeders) /2) multipled by 6 to get the new A (newborns) spot. Eventually I had this:
After the 9th and final cycle of year one there were 1808 rats on the island.
SELF-ASSESSMENT:
Personally I am very confident that my answer is correct because of many reasons. TO get to my final answer I went through three different ways of trying to solve it (documenting two), perfecting the formula every time. I also compared my answer with that of my teacher and my peers seeing if there was a consensus of answers between all of us. I organized my problem incredibly well and made a process that was easy to follow creating a higher chance to either find a problem in the process or getting more accurate.