There's an exercise on Hackerrank, a programming website, that asks me to find the number of consecutive 1s in a binary representation of a decimal number (e.g. 5 is 101 in binary). The author of the problem gave sample inputs and outputs along with his explanations:
Sample Case 1: The binary representation of 5 is 101, so the maximum number of consecutive 1's is 1.
Sample Case 2: The binary representation of 13 is 1101, so the maximum number of consecutive 1's is 2.
Why are there 1 consecutive 1s in the number 101? The term consecutive by its very definition implies sequential multiplicity. It makes sense to say that there are two consecutive 1s in the second example because there is a single "1" followed by yet another "1", but why does it make sense to say there are 1 consecutive 1s? I've never heard anyone use the term "consecutive" to describe a single item.