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Sunday Times Teaser 2878 – Magic Slides

by Victor Bryant

Published November 19 2017 (link)

I have a toy consisting of eight tiles that can move by sliding them around a three-by-three frame:

1  2  3
4  5  6
7  8

At any stage a tile adjacent to the space can slide into that space. I gave the toy to my grandson in the state illustrated and after some moves he presented it back to me with the space once again in the bottom right-hand corner but with the “2” (amongst others) not in its original position. Furthermore, his arrangement had some “magical” properties: each row, each column, and the diagonal from bottom left to top right all added up to the same total.

What was his arrangement?

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