The Conversation (0)
Indy100 Staff
Mar 24, 2016
These two triangles are both made up of four coloured shapes. But in the second triangle there is a missing square
Picture: Krauss/Creative CommonsThis gif confuses things even more
So how does the missing square puzzle work? Scroll down to find out
The missing square comes about because the slopes on the two triangles are not actually straight
In fact, the shape of the puzzle is not even technically a triangle - it's a quadrilateral - because the "hypotenuse" (the longest side of the "triangle") is bent.
As Brightside explains:
In reality, this is not an optical illusion, but a really interesting task. The areas of the colored pieces are of course equal (32 cells), but even if both figures look like triangles of 13×5, it isn’t so. In fact, they have different areas (S 13×5 = 32.5 cells). So the mystery of the puzzle is that the first figure called a triangle is, in fact, a concave quadrangle.
This picture of the red and blue triangles helps to highlight the illusion
As does this gif from Russian website Novate:
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