Not what it sounds like.
The four dog problem from Steve Strogatz:

N dogs start in the corners of a regular N-gon. Each runs directly toward the dog on its left. How far do they run before colliding?

— Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz) October 27, 2015

Here is how it was used in my class.

Halfway Dogs

If the dogs blindly travel half way towards the next dog before re-aiming, then you get this picture, where each vertex represents the dog’s position:

If you raise each square up in the z-dimension and print the resulting 3d shape then you can get this:

12% Dogs

If the dogs travel 12% of the way before re-aiming then you get this picture, and this 3d shape:

Interactive 2d Version

The generalized interactive 2d version of this concept is a lot of fun to play with. In this demo, your mouse horizontal controls how much to spin each square, and your mouse vertical controls how much to scale each square. Matt Enlow was the driving force behind this super fun demo. Some samples:

Code

Here’s the code for both of these shapes in madeup:

Halfway dogs:

thickness = 3
size = 10.0
theta = 0
z = 0
repeat 15
  t = 0
  while t <= 360
    x = size * cos (t + theta)
    y = size * sin (t + theta)
    t = t + 90
    moveto x,y,z
  end
  extrude 0,0,1,thickness
  theta = theta + 45
  thickness = thickness * (0.5)^0.5
  z = z + thickness
  size = size * (0.5)^0.5
end

12% dogs:

thickness = 1
size = 10.0
theta = 0
z = 0
repeat 35
  t = 0
  while t <= 360
    x = size * cos (t + theta)
    y = size * sin (t + theta)
    t = t + 90
    moveto x,y,z
  end
  extrude 0,0,1,thickness
  theta = theta + 8.775
  thickness = thickness * 0.84
  z = z + thickness
  size = size * 0.8775
end

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