Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Fun with toothpicks: solutions plus one more puzzle

First the new puzzle:

Make seven equilateral (and equal) triangles using nine toothpicks.

Now the solutions.

1) For this one my dad pointed out to me that it suffices to move just three toothpicks.  This is the result after you move them (of course if you really want to move four you can just move the right-most square a bit over to the right).


2) After moving the toothpick

3) This is what it looks like after moving the toothpicks.  Hopefully it's easy to figure out which ones got moved.

4) Here is a picture with the toothpicks that you have to move slanted
and here is a picture with them moved (and slanted in their new positions)

And finally, four triangles with six toothpicks.  You make a tetrahedron as in the picture.
 This is my favorite because you have to realize that you can use the third dimension!

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