12 April 2011

2. Square in Square

Easy Medium Hard Extreme


One of my favourites...

Shown in the figure are only 3 squares. Move 2 sticks to form 4 squares all equal in size.

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The 4 squares are:

1: Area A
2: Areas B + C
3: Areas C + D
4: Areas D + E

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6 comments:

  1. Squares have four equal sides. These don't, they are rectangles.

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  2. The squares are overlapping; the rectangles are formed by the overlaps.

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  3. My solution was to take two matchsticks and cross them inside one of the larger squares. That creates four small squares equal in size and there's some extraneous larger squares that don't matter.

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  4. it is not having a perfect solution

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  5. There's another solution if you think in 3D. You can treat the original top and left squares as front and back faces of a cube, and move the two hanging matches to form the top of the cube. Then you have three faces of the cube (all squares in 3D), and then the rightmost square.

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