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Cute. Honorable mention.

Creative. But sqrt is not available.

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.

Perhaps check it again: Don't sweat the acronym thing, I don't know how long you've been around, but I've been around on and off for years and bon-chan (my nickname for bonanova ) has been around even longer, and it's a very common practice to use acronyms, so common we sometimes take it for granted . Tone is something that's pretty subjective in text (I've been a victim of having mine misread myself), so I can't tell for sure where your post was negative or not, but I think it's generally considered bad form to criticize someone's puzzle. Like bon-chan said, there are plenty of puzzles here, and if you don't particularly care for one, you can simply move on to another more to your taste. As a puzzle maker myself, I think the thing you have to understand is that many puzzle designers put a lot of time and thought into designing puzzles, and it doesn't seem very nice when someone puts down something that you spent effort for to provide to them for free :/. And for better or for worse, posting an answer you found online or already know kinda ruins it for people who were trying to come up with the answer on their own. Puzzle makers and puzzle solvers have a symbiotic relationship, and, seeing how activity on BrainDen has been falling off lately, I would encourage everyone to try to minimize activities and/or attitudes that would discourage either .

Drat. I just looked over that again and saw that I divided instead of multiplying when manipulating that equation after introducing the deltaA term, so it won't work.

Edit: added the figure back