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Pcia: Board Guideline 6 suggests being positive. If you find a puzzle not to your liking, try another. Authors are free to compose flavor text to suit their own particular style. Your kid sister can type the word Google. Most puzzle books have an answer section. Not really the point of buying the book, tho, is it? Please consider the reason you joined this site. And do read the posting guidelines. Thanks.

Edit: This assumes that the legs of the stool form a square. Determining whether it applies if the legs are in any other orientation is left as an exercise for the reader.

The statement of your problem would have been much clearer (and leaving no ambiguity that you wanted only one question answered) if you had phrased part of it along these lines: [insert the first original two sentences as given.] We'll assume all squares are one unit on a side, and we might ask, "What is the length of such a trip?" Wait. This is Brainden. You are all geniuses. Let's alter the problem.** [insert the remaining original text.] ** You're not just "adding a wrinkle." You're substantially changing the problem, mainly going from shortest path to maximal length path.

A little more care has to be taken when presenting puzzles like this. Instructions need to made as explicit as possible. In this (original) puzzle, you are supposed to be told that you must use both of the threes and both of the eights, but no other digits. And you must use them in their original orientation. For example, you cannot flip a "3" around and meld it to a second "3" to form an "8." Concatenation, for example forming "33," should not be used unless stated. You can choose only from some combination of addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication. (An aside: Is the "-" permissible as a negative sign?) And unlimited use of parentheses is allowed. Notice how parentheses may be used for grouping and/or multiplication, depending on the circumstances of their placement in a given expression. Any of those alleged solutions in this thread that made use of the square root don't count, because that is not one of the four basic operations listed above. Unfortunately/fortunately, it is relatively easy to google this problem and find multiple sites with the solution.