Non-Trivial Challenges

[AuthorInventor]

You can be the best Sudoku solver in the world, but in the end all you have are integers 1 through 9.
Wordle is a step above, as it requires you to consider which of the approximately 70,000 five-letter words will fit under the day's conditions and guesses.

Let's put our heads together and assemble challenges or puzzles that have interesting answers which often lead us to related and interesting conclusions and/or new directions.

I will begin with an old English riddle which presents a lesson within a lesson. Those are not very common, it seems to me.

As I walking to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives.
Each wife had seven sacks. Each sack had seven cats.
Each cat had seven kits.
Kits, cats, sacks, wives, how many were going to St. Ives?

Please don't look up the answer. Think it through. It's good exercise.
After a few answers, I will provide the answer, derived from a lesson and a second lesson derived from the first lesson.

[rasbury]

I get 2,403

[AuthorInventor]

"Kits, cats, sacks wives, how many were going to St. Ives?"

[AuthorInventor]

Here is a non-trivial challenge few have ever thought about.

I have never been asked this question and never seen it posed before positing it myself.

What is the most profound, most important thing you have learned?

[AuthorInventor]

Here is a non-trivial and decidedly unexpected challenge for all readers of this bored.
I scrutinized the first five pages of posts and of the hundreds of views, there were exactly FIVE (5) "Likes."
This suggests one or both of two things, neither of them very commendable.
1. As a group, you have nothing very interesting (likeable) to say.
2. As a group, you are extremely ungrateful, unappreciative.

My opinion is that it is a combination of both one and two. It cannot be neither.
Think about it, and up your game. Show some appreciation, some comradery, and some creativity.