# Billion Matchsticks

A little twist on the "move the matchsticks" puzzle.

I placed a bunch of matchsticks on my kitchen table and formed a number with them (6,111,100). I am asking, how can you move just two matchsticks, so that you get a number as close as possible to one billion (1,000,000,000)?

Remark: Thanks to Mr Pie for awarding a bounty to Deusovi. His answer was the intended one, but BreakingMyself provided a similar one first; that's the reason I gave him the checkmark.

• I hope you don't mind my expansion of this puzzle and usage of your image: puzzling.stackexchange.com/questions/53509/… – Adam Davis Jul 17 '17 at 12:34
• @AdamDavis of course not, our goal is to help each other build better puzzles here:) – Puzzle Prime Jul 17 '17 at 13:10
• Moving 4 matches i can make GOGOL. Waaay more than a billion! – Florian F Sep 19 '18 at 14:18

A quick and dirty answer, hopefully this is it!:

As you can see, just two matches moved to create '1,000,000,000' :)

• The intended answer is posted by @Deusovi below, but BreakingMyself first posted the correct idea. – Puzzle Prime Jul 15 '17 at 18:10
• @Deusovi has a billion accepted answers already, I don't think he would mind it:) – Puzzle Prime Jul 15 '17 at 18:27
• @ArturKirkoryan is right - I really don't mind! And your answer is just as valid. – Deusovi Jul 15 '17 at 18:52
• It took me way to long to figure out why you have the same table as the OP... – JFBM Jul 16 '17 at 15:29
• NEVERMIND I GET IT. AHAHA – Rivasa Jul 16 '17 at 20:58

Similar to BreakingMyself's answer, but I think this is what you were looking for:

• How dare you ;) – BreakingMyself Jul 15 '17 at 17:02
• This was my intended answer, but I will have to give the credit to @BreakingMyself, since he first posted the idea:) – Puzzle Prime Jul 15 '17 at 17:03
• Surely this can be done moving only 1 match if you use a Capital B and Small L (l)? – Weckar E. Jul 17 '17 at 12:01
• @Weckar E. I thought about this when I was making the puzzle, but it would make 'l' and 'i' look the same, and also '8' and 'b' look the same. I think the characters Deusovi used are more or less the standard ones. – Puzzle Prime Jul 19 '17 at 13:08
• Congratulations!! $\boxed{\color{blue}{+100}}$ :D – Mr Pie Jul 8 '19 at 23:18

if the answer is to be of numeric form, this is closest i can think of. 611,111,110

• use one of the matches to form an 8 from the 6 – Do Re Jul 17 '17 at 13:59
• where do you get the additional match? – Yevgeniy Nov 28 '17 at 20:26

Depending on whether the _numbers_ must conform to seven segment display format the first image is correct. If only digits are allowed (no alpha chars you cheaters!) but don't need to conform to the seven segment display format, the second is more correct.