SPUG: Stick Riddle

Asim Jalis asimjalis at acm.org
Thu Jan 2 20:46:19 CST 2003


On Thu, Jan 02, 2003 at 06:33:07PM -0800, Don Shanks wrote:
> Am I missing something, or do three sticks joined end to end
> always make a triangle?

They don't. Sandy Morton posted a neatly drawn ASCII picture
earlier in this thread which illustrated this nicely. 

To demonstrate that with a concrete counter-example: Consider
three sticks of length 1, 1, 3. These can't form a triangle since
the sum of the first two is smaller than the third. 

In general, if A, B, C are the lengths of the sticks in
increasing order, for them to form a triangle, A + B >= C.

Asim

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