Optical Illusions and Considering Minimal Examples to Explain

There is a very old “disappearing cyclist” puzzle, by Sam Loyd, you may have seen or seen a variation upon the theme. In Ben Sparks‘ video he gives a great overview:

Do you notice that the boy near the bottom of the puzzle changes, and others get smaller or bigger…

A great illustrative example he shows is a similar 5 faces in a line – in which case it shows that the faces are obviously not the same face, in fact every face is different, the previous faces have been removed and are different faces. Minimal examples like this, are a good way to deconstruct how a trick is done – or how a math solution is solved, for that matter.

You can see that the positions of the bicyclists in the rotated version of the bicyclist puzzle, they are different so in fact they are all removed, with a bit of leg missing or reduced, or added to the point that it is a whole person in the inside of the wheel, extra!

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