[possiblywrong]

Author of the article here-- right! This was the key "real world" motivation for this experiment as an attempt at a pedagogical tool; from the article:

> As an aside, I think the fact that this particular concrete application happens to be recreational, or even downright frivolous, is beside the point. For one thing, recreational mathematics is fun. But perhaps more importantly, there are useful, non-recreational, “real-world” applications of the same underlying mathematics. Cryptography is one such example application; this experiment is really just a birthday attack in slightly more complicated form.

[mikorym]

Sometimes I find these concrete investigations necessary for our brains to make peace with the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics, as it's been called.

I would say one of the first great discoveries for a person is the exponential series (a real world examples: population growth). Another is the divergence of the harmonic series 1/n and convergence of 1/n^2 (my preferred real world example: pizza slices that converge to 1 pizza or diverge to infinitely many). E.g. give me 1/n slices for the rest of my life and I'll pay you $100 (-:

When travelling, I also have go-to experiments that I like doing (e.g., elementary proofs that the earth is round/spherical such as: great circles; N-E-S-W always at 90 degrees; shadow angles [Erastothenes]; seasons; etc.)

There are other things to investigate that are not really "proofs" or "combinatorial evidence", but equally interesting. One example is using music (esp. the piano) as a physical logarithm device. The music "sounds" additive but the frequencies are multiplicative.