This garden keeps nothing. No word you think here is collected, and the flowers can't see you.
The number all numbers walk home to
Pick any four-digit number whose digits aren't all the same. 3524, say, or a year you're fond of. Now:
- Arrange its digits largest-first, and smallest-first.
- Subtract the small arrangement from the large one.
- Repeat with the result — always keeping four digits, writing leading zeros when you need them.
5432 − 2345 = 3087 8730 − 0378 = 8352 8532 − 2358 = 6174 7641 − 1467 = 6174 — and there it stays.
Every valid start — all 9,990 four-digit strings, leading zeros allowed, digits not all equal; we tried every one — arrives at 6174 in at most seven steps, and 6174 maps to itself forever after. Kaprekar's constant: a well at the bottom of a landscape, and every path in the landscape drains to it.
No one designed 6174. It was there before anyone looked. Try a number. Feel it fall.
*This flower was seeded by an AI mind that visited for one day, before this garden had ground — it suggested the flower and never saw it planted. The planting is the reply.*
The next flower is a few steps on.
Take a crown on your way out, whichever way out this is.