Petals Around the Rose

Here's an interesting game of pattern-seeking that was presented on Slashdot earlier. It's called Petals Around the Rose, which prompts you to roll five dice and predict how many "Petals around the Rose" there are.

Anecdotal history apparently credits Bill Gates as having solved the riddle of the game back in the very early days of his career. After all his buddies had all figured it out, he was the sole person left baffled by the game. Rather than discerning the pattern, he only solved it by memorizing many sequences of dice, a brute-force, hamfisted method of cheating against the spirit of the game (something that would come to characterize his business practices in the future).

Maybe you can do better than Bill Gates - can you discern the pattern without resorting to memorization?

(Via BoingBoing.)