IT looks easy enough but this ancient brain teaser has baffled for almost 100 years.
The puzzle starts with eight coins arranged in an H shape.
1
Can you figure out?
To solve the puzzle, you have to move just four coins to create an O shape.
The Water Puzzle – devised in 1920 by Henry Ernest Dudeney – features in a new book by Alex Bellos, called Can You Solve My Problems?
Each of the four coins must always be touching two others in the shape and no gaps are allowed.
The conundrum is designed to test your ability to think laterally and mathematically.
The Answer
To solve the puzzle keep all the coins on the left in their original place.
Move the left hand coin of the two in the middle to the top right of the shape.
Next, the coin to the right of that one is moved to the space in the middle of the top row.
There are now two coins left at the bottom on the far right column.
Move the top coin to the left hand side of the bottom coin, then move the final coin to the middle, to complete the O.
The new book is a compendium of 125 of the best puzzles ever, with arying difficulties from primary school level to some that even mathematician Alex couldn’t solve.
Henry Ernest Dudeney was one of Britain’s greatest puzzle innovators and began writing teasers for papers at the age of nine.
Writing under the name Sphinx, he produced recreational brain teasers for newspapers and magazines for over 40 years before he died in 1930, at the age of 73.
If you enjoyed this brain teaser have a go at the car in the box puzzle or see if you can spot the robin in a herd of reindeer.
Categories: Optical Illusion
Source: HIS Education