King Arthurs Table

1. Problem Statement
King Arthur plays a game with his knights of the round table and the winner gets a prize. He
goes around the table starting with the first chair and says youre in, and at the next knight he
says youre out. He continues around the table as many times as needed for only one knight to
remain, skipping empty chairs. Depending on how many knights are at the table, how could you
find a formula to find which seat would be the winner of King Arthurs prize?

2. Visual + Process
I started by going through by hand and making the tables up to 34, and where the second
column of my table represents which chair was the winner of the round. After creating the
column, the patterns I noticed was that all of the even numbered chairs were eliminated, and all
of the winners were consecutive odd numbers, where the pattern reset on each power of 2. It
reset at 2, 4, 8, 16, 32,

After looking at this and the winning seat, you can see that there is a linear decrease in the
difference in the winning seat for each power of two.
When the pattern starts over, the difference between the number of knights and the winning
seat is always the number of knights minus one. And from there it will continue to increase until
the pattern restarts. So if you have 8 nights, because it's the start of the pattern it will be 8-7=1.
After analysing the data charts and patterns I came up with a general solution that can be used
to solve the winning seat but isnt a formula. If you know the number of knights that are at the
table then you can find the power of 2 that is just below the number of knights. Subtract that
number from the knights, multiply by 2, then add 1 to the answer.
3. Solution
2(T 2x ) + 1 = W inning Seat
T= # of knights at the round table
x=power of 2
4. Evaluation
I think that this problem wasnt challenging in the aspect of creating the charts and data tables,
however I do find it challenging to come up with a formula where you can just plug in numbers
to find the solution. This problem did help me because it challenged me to think of all the
different ways a solution could be found. Although it was a little disheartening in the beginning
because it seemed as if a solution would require writing everything out. I think that this problem
might have been better sooner in the year when we were still in the middle of powers of two
since it was confusing to be working on derivatives and this at the same time.
5. Self-Assessment
I feel confident in my ability to find the winning seat for the knights at the round table even
though I dont have a plug-n-chug formula. I think that I should receive an A on this POW not
because of my solution, but because of how I challenged myself to think critically and approach
this problem from multiple angles. I think that I did quite well in creating data tables to represent
the visual part of the problem.