I am not a puzzle person. I’m very analytical and I’ve always considered myself a smart person, but I’ve never been especially good at puzzles. It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that it took me more than half an hour to solve the leap frog puzzle that my mother emailed to me the other day.
The rules are pretty simple. You have to move the frogs on the left to the lilypads on the right and vice versa. You can have a frog slide or leap over an adjacent frog to reach an unoccupied lilypad, but the frogs can only move in one direction. Trust me, it seems simple, but it’s not a straightforward as it sounds. Supposedly it took some of my mother’s coworkers all day to finish.
I’ve posted the solution to the basic six-frog puzzle below. No peaking unless you’ve at least tried to do it on your own first.
Solution:
Labelling the right-facing frogs as “R” and the left-facing frogs as “L”, your frogs begin like so.
R1 R2 R3 _ L1 L2 L3
Step One: Move R3.
R1 R2 _ R3 L1 L2 L3
Step Two: Hop L1 over R3.
R1 R2 L1 R3 _ L2 L3
Step Three: Move L2.
R1 R2 L1 R3 L2 _ L3
Step Four: Hop R3 over L2.
R1 R2 L1 _ L2 R3 L3
Step Five: Hop R2 over L1.
R1 _ L1 R2 L2 R3 L3
Step Six: Move R1.
_ R1 L1 R2 L2 R3 L3
Step Seven: Hop L1 over R1.
L1 R1 _ R2 L2 R3 L3
Step Eight: Hop L2 over R2.
L1 R1 L2 R2 _ R3 L3
Step Nine: Hop L3 over R3.
L1 R1 L2 R2 L3 R3 _
Step Ten: Move R3.
L1 R1 L2 R2 L3 _ R3
Step Eleven: Hop R2 over L3.
L1 R1 L2 _ L3 R2 R3
Step Twelve: Hop R1 over L2.
L1 _ L2 R1 L3 R2 R3
Step Thirteen: Move L2.
L1 L2 _ R1 L3 R2 R3
Step Fourteen: Hop L3 over R1.
L1 L2 L3 R1 _ R2 R3
Step Fifteen: Move R1.
L1 L2 L3 _ R1 R2 R3
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on Thursday, September 28th, 2006 at 6:12 am and is filed under Online Games.
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WOW! This was sooooo difficult. And to make it worse, the email I received said “2nd grade students complete this puzzle in 2 minutes”. Thanks for the instructions. Once I realized that I couldn’t figure it out on my own, I just HAD to conquer it somehow….
March 30th, 2007 at 8:56 am
WOW! This was sooooo difficult. And to make it worse, the email I received said “2nd grade students complete this puzzle in 2 minutes”. Thanks for the instructions. Once I realized that I couldn’t figure it out on my own, I just HAD to conquer it somehow….
June 3rd, 2007 at 8:03 am
Thanks, we needed to do this for a school progect and none of us had any idea how to do this, thanks for putting this up.
September 22nd, 2007 at 5:06 am
thx for the answer dear