A Puzzle Book That Drove England to Madness | Hacker News Reader

A Puzzle Book That Drove England to Madness

hazlitt.net

146 pointsohjeez30 comments

For some reason this reminds me of the Eternity II puzzle[1]. The creator of the puzzle had mathematicians confirm how difficult it would be to solve due to the number of permutations and yet a vast number of people bought it thinking they would be the ones to solve it (usually by hand)! There was a $2 million prize and it was never solved.

1.https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_II_puzzle

That's kind of a cruel thing to do to people if there's no way to solve it other than brute force.

Yeah, the original Eternity puzzle (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_puzzle) was a lot better in that regard - it spiked a whole online community focused on finding clever ways to find a solution, and was in fact solved within a year.

The Wikipedia article mentions $10k was awarded for an exceptional albeit partial solution

Demobilized link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternity_II_puzzle

Images with analysis: http://bunnyears.net/kitwilliams/

Weird, as far as I can tell the website here is looking at understanding references in the text. For example the poems round the images on page 2 are "one of six of eight" which might refer to Henry VIII's wives.

Yet in the public domain the solution is known - a brief google lead me to "draw a line from left eye to left foot and extend to a letter, the letters forming an anagram of the location.

Really the site seems a historical oddity.

According to Wikipedia the solution is along those lines but more complicated.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_%28book%29#Solution

The site gives the solution, on page 12; though I'm not sure how that picture is the key to the whole book.

Kit Williams is highly collectable in darkest Gloucestershire. The thing is that you have to know him, have his work already and know him to be allowed to buy his work.

Some documentaries made by the BBC:

From back in the day:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iU-qoG9Upg

Retrospective, recent:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEIFm0UHtoo

Game designer Brian Moriarty's 2002 Game Developers Conference talk discusses Masquerade quite a bit and I think does a good job of viscerally conveying its appeal. The text of the talk is here: http://ludix.com/moriarty/psalm46.html , but I think it's worth listening to the original recording, which you can get here: http://number-none.com/blow/media/psalm_46.mp3

The backtrack on the original recording is really distracting, anyone got a source without this?

The human brain has mastered pretty much one skill -- pattern recognition -- and it will apply this skill wherever it can, finding answers even where none exist.

Can't help but to think about Google Machine Learning 'Art' they showed not long ago.

I owned a translation of this book as a kid and had no luck (there was no way of knowing, pre-Internet, that the riddle had already been solved). Many years later I got the 1982 paperback English edition, which contained the solution as described by the author. It turns out that the crucial clue had been mangled by the translators.

If anyone wants to do something like this but a bit less quixotic, and you live in Boston, try the annual MIT Mystery Hunt! It only takes a weekend, and it's in January, so there's not long to wait. Just don't do it alone. Either form a team or contact them and get assigned to one. It's a great time!

This reminds me of the treasure supposedly hidden in the American Southwest by Forrest Fenn. He says it's still out there and has not yet been found. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fenn_treasure

Hmm, I think this clue is new since I last read about this: In January 2015, Fenn revealed in a new interview: "I know the treasure chest is wet." Maybe this means he recently visited the treasure site? Maybe it's worth it to surveil him in case he goes again.

Which in turn reminds me of the Beale papers - which were almost certainly a hoax describing a nonexistent treasure. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beale_ciphers

There is an hour-long documentary on the book and its author entitled The Man Behind the Masquerade:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEIFm0UHtoo

See also The Ultimate Alphabet which I pored over for years as a teenager - e.g. this is "S" which apparently has 1234 words illustrated (the complete book had 7777 total) - http://www.codex99.com/illustration/56.html

It came with a £10,000 prize for the best effort but I can't find any info about the winner.

http://ken-jennings.com/blog/archives/99

There was a winner.

"MW: Again, I can’t recall who won. Interestingly the winner was the one who identified the least number of false words. I think there was some scoring system where an incorrectly identified word attracted a minus penalty. I seem to remember that the contest was expanded with the paperback edition to include extra prizes for a younger age group."

I owned a copy. It was beautiful. I got as far as finding the rabbit in every picture, that was it.

Same here. Fantastic book though - made up for the disappointment of never working it out (hey, I was 11.. ;) )

I found an old copy recently for 50p.

It may be worth more than that. I haven't checked.

My sister got that book for her b'day because she's into puzzles.

It didn't come with plane tickets to England so wasn't the best gift idea.

According to Wikipedia, Williams would have accepted remote answers to the puzzle too:

"To ensure that readers from further afield had an equal chance of winning, Williams also announced that he would confirm the first precisely correct answer sent to him by post."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masquerade_(book)

It reminds me of the modern Web you look at a news article see something you don't understand maybe a word so you search for the word, then that leads to the etymology of it and ten hours later you're still going into the rabbit hole.

If anyone is interested in similar things, check out DASH [0] and Geocaching (for a puzzle based narrative, check out Geocaching's WherIGo) [1,2]

[0]: http://playdash.org/ [1]: https://www.geocaching.com/play [2]: http://www.wherigo.com

There's something similar going on now called Endgame. See http://www.endgamegold.com/

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