Five squares are made up from the 16 sticks below:

   _ _ _
 _|_|_|_|
|_|_|

Move just two of the sticks without disturbing or overlapping the other 14 sticks to make only 4 identical squares, still using all 16 sticks.

The solution was posted, but nobody seems to explain how they solved it.

The first thing to consider is that you are trying to get 4 squares using all 16 sticks.  To do that, each square must use 4 sticks and no square can share sticks.

All you have to do is look for a way to move to sticks so that none of the square share them.

Posted by Albert on 2005-09-27 01:03:03