Devising a Plan: Strategy

Develop a strategy to solve the problem.

Strategy

We need to figure out a strategy to find the relationship between the number of bulbs and the number of possible arrangements.

Does this relationship follow any pattern?

We know there are two possible arrangements with only one bulb and four with two bulbs. The total number of arrangements seems to equal twice the number of bulbs. That means we can have 20 different arrangements with an array of ten bulbs. That’s quite simple.

Let’s investigate further and find out the number of arrangements with three bulbs.

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