In a huge room lives a very hungry ant. The room is 4 meters wide, 4 meters high and 10 meters long. The ant is on one of the 4x4-meter walls, right in the middle (2 meters from each of the 4x10-meter walls), and 1 meter from the ceiling. Its food is on the opposite wall, also in the middle, but 1 meter from the floor. The poor ant is very hungry, and won't be able to walk more than 13.99 meters without dropping dead. Can it survive?
(The ant cannot fly, jump etc.)
The ant can survive, as it only needs to travel sqrt(194) = 13.928... meters. It does this by taking a straight line path between the two x's below, to traverse the hypotenuse of a 5x13 right triangle (the diagram shows the room "unfolded"):
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| x |
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Solution
