Hi there. Interested in a real brain crunching puzzle? look at this picture. And tell me how this can be. I know the answer. Can you figure it out?

The secret lies in the gradients.........

I just say this last week, count the boxes.

i don't know what either of you guys are talking about, it's all about karma, duh! it's like the line isn't straight, but it is, but it isn't, see?

geez.

or more succinctly
2/5 ne 3/8 => eyes deceive

this is purely speculative, but it may have something to do with the curvature of the diagram and the metric tensor....

This can only mean two things. One, you guy's way more clever then I am, because the first time I saw that my self, I coulden't figure it out. Or, second, you have alraidy seen this.

Or third - both of the above

I dont see what the big deal is, move the upper set of blocks over 3 and down 1 and you have a space where the dot is.

The secret is that neither hypotenuse is a straight line.

er, that each hypotenuse is straight, but they have slightly different slopes (2/5 and 3/8 for small and large triangle, resp.); this is not easily discerned by the naked eye (.4 and .375 are damn close), so that it appears that the total figure has a uniform slope along its "hypotenuse" which is not really a hypotenuse, as the slopes differ.

to see this is the case is obvious, as the net area must change upon rearrangement to allow for the additional empty block. the suggestive feature of this puzzle is that the points where the individual hypotenuses intersect the grid change slightly upon rearrangement, although the endpoints are stationary.

That's a rip

"er, that each hypotenuse is straight, but they have slightly different slopes (2/5 and 3/8 for small and large triangle, resp.);"

yocompia

You and I agree. The two hypothenuse that I am refering to are the upper and lower "triangles". The two hypothenuse that you are refering to are the hypothenuse of the green and red triangles.

What is the plural of hypothenuse?

hypothenua, I guess. But even then, the formulation of
is wrong. Both of them are straight. It's just that they don't have equal slopes.

" Both of them are straight. It's just that they don't have equal slopes."

I agree that the hypothenua of both the green triangle and the red triangle are straight lines and I never thought otherwise. What I was trying to describe is that the line formed by combining the hypothenua of the green and red triangles is not a straight line in either the upper or lower figure.

I fail to see the big deal in this...

All it really involves is switching the triangles and sliding the green block to the right 3 squares and up once...

Somebody fill me in, what was the big question on it anyway?

Artimus i feel the same way, unless theres something were missing it seems pretty simple.