A Tale From Flatland

My day started off like any normal day. I sipped on my daily latte and went to work. I logged onto Gold Token, thinking I would make all my backgammon moves, perhaps glance at a chess game or two, and then resume design work on a code generator I've been working on. But a new post in the Puzzles and Riddles discussion board caught my eye.

A man starts from the North Pole and walks 6 miles in a straight line. He then faces East and walks 8 miles in a straight line. He then returns to the North pole in a straight line. How many miles did he walk altogether?

And so the fun began. I myself remained confused about the answer for some time. Eventually most people participating in the thread concluded that the correct answer was 24 miles (actually a very close approximation to 24 miles). You can use the Pythagorean theorem to derive the answer, since you're tracing a right triangle:

This answer isn't exact, since we're tracing a right triangle on the surface of a sphere, but it's only off by a very small fraction, so that rounding the answer produces 24 miles.

It's easy to initially come up with an answer of 20 miles (6 + 8 + 6 = 20), by misreading the puzzle as saying the second leg of the trip is traveled eastward, since you begin it facing east. But the puzzle says the man walks in a straight line, and a line of latitude 6 miles from the north pole is curved, not straight.

Or so I thought.