"What do you think
of these?"
The Professor
brought from his capacious pockets a
number of
frogs,
snails, lizards, and other creatures of Japanese
manufacture—very
grotesque in form and brilliant in colour.
While we were looking at
them
he asked the waiter to place sixty-four tumblers on the club
table.
When
these had been brought and arranged in the form of a square, as shown
in
the illustration, he placed eight of the little green frogs on the
glasses as shown.
"Now," he said,
"you see these tumblers form eight
horizontal
and eight
vertical lines, and if you look at them diagonally (both ways) there
are
twenty-six other lines.
If you run your eye along all these forty-two
lines, you will find no two frogs are anywhere in a line.
"The puzzle is
this.
Three of the frogs are
supposed to jump
from their
present position to three vacant glasses, so that in their new relative
positions still no two frogs shall be in a line.
What are the jumps
made?"
"I
suppose——" began Hawkhurst.
"I know what you
are going to ask," anticipated
the Professor.
"No; the
frogs do not exchange positions, but each of the three jumps to a glass
that was not previously occupied."
"But surely there
must be scores of solutions?" I
said.
"I shall be very
glad if you can find them,"
replied the
Professor with a
dry smile. "I only know of one—or rather two, counting a
reversal, which
occurs in consequence of the position being symmetrical."
See answer
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