Again received an overwhelming number of answers to this puzzle. People who answered it correctly included Pratik Poddar, Anant Aggarwal, Siddharth Mulherkar, Suman Saraf, P R Kumar and Amit Mittal. The puzzle had a simple trick to it, which is that the phrase we are trying to get to is embedded itself within the phrase.
I am reproducing the answer from Pratik Poddar.
Lets say that the value is x.
sqrt (12+x) = x
x^2 – x – 12 = 0
(x-4)(x+3) = 0
x = 4 (since x>0)
Hope you all enjoyed the puzzle!
Btw, I had posted a comment on the original puzzle (not the solution) which appears to have been deleted. I am reproducing it again
If we assumed it was a converging series we could also have replaced the expressions like
x = sqrt(12+sqrt(12+x))
this would yield an equation of the 4th degree
x^4 – 24*x^2 – x + 132 = 0
which could be factorized as
(x-4)(x+3)(x^2 + x – 11) = 0
the two positive roots are 4 and (3*sqrt(5) – 1)/2
Similarly we could extend it to higher orders and find more positive roots. Wouldn’t all of them be satisfactory solutions?
Thoughts?
Suman, this one has stumped me, I did not think of a second order substitution. Even though the equation solves with these values, I am still having a hard time as the value is approx 2.8 which seems impossible.