Can you solve it? The simple geometry question that fools almost everyone \ stacker news ~science

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Can you solve it? The simple geometry question that fools almost everyone www.theguardian.com/science/2025/feb/17/can-you-solve-it-the-simple-geometry-question-that-fools-almost-everyone

340 sats \ 8 comments \ @south_korea_ln 18 Feb science

Answers are linked in the article. Resist the temptation to peak at the answer before giving it a go yourself~~

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136 sats \ 0 replies \ @ba5df0b2d8 18 Feb freebie

0 sats \ 4 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Feb

kek, first one almost got me. $x = 0$ because triangle inequality. I'll just leave it at that.

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @south_korea_ln OP 18 Feb

Close, but not quite ;)

145 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Feb

$x = 1$ . slaps forehead

0 sats \ 1 reply \ @nout 18 Feb

What is "triangle inequality"? That triangle exists...

77 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 18 Feb

Triangle inequality says that if $a$ , $b$ , $c$ are the lengths of a triangle, then

$c \leq a + b$ .

In other words, the length of any one side can't be greater than the combined length of the other two sides. And they're only equal when the triangle collapses to a straight line.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @SimpleStacker 25 Feb

I also just tried this on ChatGPT o1. It got the right answer, recognizing it as a degenerate triangle and getting $x = 1$ . All I did is upload the image and tell it to give me the length of AD.

0 sats \ 0 replies \ @Scroogey 18 Feb

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