Today’s example, known broadly as a distance puzzle, is a type that shows up often at competitions. It again showed up in one of today’s individual rounds.
The instructions: Fill in the circles with different integers, starting with 1, such that each pair of consecutive integers is farther apart than the previous pair. (Hint: You’ll have to do a little time-traveling back to high school geometry and dust off that Pythagorean Theorem!)
Here is an example of a solved puzzle:
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I find myself sometimes thinking that, if I tried, I could do something like this puzzle…maybe vestiges of my first grade teacher telling us that we could do anything we put our minds to. My mind cannot focus enough to even read through those directions, though!
The answer:
10 2 1
5 3
8 7
4 9
6 11