Corrupt governors always find ways to get dirty money. Paint something, then sell the worthless painting at a high price to someone who wants to bribe him/her on an auction, this seemed a safe way for mayor X to make money.
Because a lot of people praised mayor X's painting(of course, X was a mayor), mayor X believed more and more that he was a very talented painter. Soon mayor X was not satisfied with only making money. He wanted to be a famous painter. So he joined the local painting associates. Other painters had to elect him as the chairman of the associates. Then his painting sold at better price.
The local middle school from which mayor X graduated, wanted to beat mayor X's horse fart(In Chinese English, beating one's horse fart means flattering one hard). They built a wall, and invited mayor X to paint on it. Mayor X was very happy. But he really had no idea about what to paint because he could only paint very abstract paintings which nobody really understand. Mayor X's secretary suggested that he could make this thing not only a painting, but also a performance art work.
This was the secretary's idea:
The wall was divided into N segments and the width of each segment was one cun(cun is a Chinese length unit). All segments were numbered from 1 to N, from left to right. There were 30 kinds of colors mayor X could use to paint the wall. They named those colors as color 1, color 2 .... color 30. The wall's original color was color 2. Every time mayor X would paint some consecutive segments with a certain kind of color, and he did this for many times. Trying to make his performance art fancy, mayor X declared that at any moment, if someone asked how many kind of colors were there on any consecutive segments, he could give the number immediately without counting.
But mayor X didn't know how to give the right answer. Your friend, Mr. W was an secret officer of anti-corruption bureau, he helped mayor X on this problem and gained his trust. Do you know how Mr. Q did this?