Learning from Turing’s silver hoard (2016) | Hacker News Reader

Learning from Turing’s silver hoard (2016)

reuters.com

63 pointsEndXA46 comments

I worked on a farm in the former West Germany (BRD), before the re-unification, not far over the border from East Germany (DDR). The proprietor's family was leasing the historic farmstead. His family's original farm had been just over the border in the DDR, and of course appropriated by the government. At the point they learned the American occupiers were withdrawing and they would be in the Russian occupation zone, they high-tailed it into the American occupation zone.

They visited me in America a couple years after The Wall fell, and he told me the rest of the story. Apparently his father's initial plan was to stick it out and see how things unfolded, but first they buried the family silver in the forest. He was in his early teens and supplied the teenage labor.

When they could return after the wall fell, he remembered roughly where the hoard should be. It took him a couple days with a metal detector, but they found it. He was very lucky because it was very near where the DDR had done trenching for the boarder hazards employed all along the east/west border. Some of the pieces were in very bad shape after 45 years underground, but most of it could be restored.

how has that silver been spent?

family silver, as in definition n. 4

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/silver

I highly recommend Turing's biography “Alan Turing: The Enigma” from which this story is taken. It's a great book. Very detailed and well researched. Author dives into many topics related to Turing's work like math, ai, cryptography.

This is a terrible analysis. Neither of the investing mistakes he supposedly made are applicable to his case. Nor was his method "intended to wring the last cent of profit out of a good trade over capitalizing more safely on his market prediction". He feared seizure! Losing a large proportion or all of your capital is not "the last cent".

I agree. Interesting anecdote followed by simply moronic commentary tacked on to the end. And no, diversification is not a 'free lunch'.

My relatives did this when fleeing from the bolsheviks. When they returned a hotel had been built where they buried their treasure.

So much for the family fortune. They owned gemstone mines.

Is it safe to say that the construction crew who excavated the foundation had a very good Christmas that year?

If they used heavy equipment to do the digging, it's unlikely they even saw the cache.

This would have made a nice scene in that awful Imitation Game film, unlike the rubbish they actually put in (as well as other tales of the real Turing - the gas mask worn during hay fever season, for example).

It was used in the semi-historical Cryptonomicon

https://books.google.com.au/books?id=Lw-00wTgBy8C&pg=PA173&l...

> like so many very successful and brilliant people Turing was wildly over-confident in his own analysis

This is so common, yet most individuals that fall into this trap will never recognize it.

I'd probably be over-confident, too, if I was a key figure in both a major new branch of mathematics and a global war.

I thought that was a strange takeaway for the article to take. His analysis was correct. He was undone by a factor he didn't even contemplate. His confidence in his "analysis" was spot on.

There's definitely a lesson here, but I would not call it over-confidence. If the bank had gone under, would that have been called over-confidence on the part of his friend? At some point, every mistake of any kind whatsoever is called "over-confidence".

Over-competence at the hiding game. ;(

Number one lesson: Don't bury stuff and expect to find it later.

Seriously, folks. I grew up around a bunch of preppers and general outside-the-law folks. Burying things in ammo cans was kind of a pastime of a lot of people I knew.

It's _really_ hard to find something like that a year or two later, even if you think you know exactly where it is.

I've been the person wielding the shovel to dig up a box of important stuff before. (Thankfully, not mine, I was just the teenage labor.) We dug a lot and never found it. Also, tree roots grow over/through things and people _love_ to bury things at the base of a tree. Kinda hard to dig through roots.

Don't bury things you want to find later.

The story asserts the landmarks changed, but can't you pick landmarks that won't change? Better yet, use GPS and grab the Lat/Long.

That's not as accurate as you think unless you've got a full geodetic antenna. (i.e. $200k worth of equipment + a lot of permits to be allowed to have/use it) Getting to within +/- 30m doesn't help a ton when you're digging a hole to find a small box.

With geocaching, you've got something to look for. You get close-ish and then do an easter egg hunt. When it's beneath the ground, it's really hard to "look". Finding easter eggs with a shovel ain't my cup of tea.

Doesn't modern GPS claim +/- 3 meters, with a clear enough signal? (Which is still a heckuva lot of dirt to shift.)

Given nearby local ground-based correction stations (e.g. WAAS) it can use and flat terrain, yeah, you can certainly get that kind of accuracy.

In practice, though, I've spent a fair bit of time trying to re-occupy sites taken with handheld GPS receivers. (I'm a geologist -- it comes up a lot) 30m is a better representation of typical repeatability for a consumer-grade handheld unit or a phone.

You're often on the side of a hill, so you can't see the full constellation. If you don't have line-of-sight to more than a few satellites, you risk an inaccurate location. You're often in highly remote areas, so WAAS doesn't always help (it's based on proximity to a ground station). If you don't have WAAS, you're at the risk of atmospheric effects significantly affecting your accuracy.

There's also the user error side: You might have the handheld set to display in NAD27 one time and WGS84 another, which can easily offset the same lat/long by several hundred meters.

+/- 3m with consumer GPS is definitely possible, but that's for ideal conditions. You're rarely working with ideal conditions in the field.

The best i've ever personally got with a handheld GPS under actual work conditions was +/- 15m. I've gotten +/- 5m in large open areas lacking trees, mountains or large rock formations but areas without any of those things are rare.

Weather conditions can make a big difference. In stormy or rainy weather I was lucky if I could get +/-20m

When you narrowed it down that much you might be able to use a metal detector or similar.

An extreme exaggeration. Geodetic antennas are neither regulated nor necessary. Any decent GPS receiver -- meaning less than US $100 -- will get you to within a couple of meters, even without WAAS.

Of course, in a SHTF scenario, GPS accuracy will start to degrade fairly rapidly as soon as the control stations are gone. So your point about not being able to return to the same spot is certainly valid.

Real-time Kinematic GPS (RTK-GPS) [1], available from Sparkfun for $200 [2] (and cheaper elsewhere), gets you centimeter accurate positioning in the US and most other countries.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_kinematic

[2] https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/what-is-gps-rtk/all

You know about continental drift, right?

Can you elaborate this more? I know about continental drifts and I know they occur at a scale much larger than a tiny box. Does it have any effect on the small scale a tiny box would be buried in if we are not burying the box near fault lines?

Australia is clipping along at 2.7”/year (about 1/16 of a meter).

That doesn’t seem like much, but in a few decades your hole is going to need to be pretty big.

IANAGeologist, but couldnt you calculate and compensate for that? Its not like continental drift is random and unpredictable (afaik, i know nothing of this subject)

Oh sure, but I know I'd get around to thinking of it after I'd moved a couple tons of dirt with a spade.

You bury something and it's outside, there's no climate control, some random metal detectorist might find your thing, maybe someone will have spotted you finishing burying the thing, no saying. Just rent a storage unit or safety deposit box. Locks are better than dirt for protecting things.

Safe deposit boxes are just awful.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/19/business/safe-deposit-box...

Interesting. Still better than dirt, though.

Woof, this can be such a pain. One of the more common ones is the pump-out hatch for a septic system. In my experience, people usually do something like remember that it was on the cross-line between this tree and that tree, and that rock and this other tree. If you don't pump the septic as often as you're supposed to, the hole gets filled in, you forget, or maybe your markers have gotten shifted, and then it's miserable poking around to find that one particular one foot square spot.

Just look for the greenest grass!

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/432288.The_Grass_Is_Alwa...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QKXkfOfhmE0

An alternate theory is that someone else dug it up first.

Doesn't seem too farfetched among "outside-the-law folks".

> Don't bury stuff and expect to find it later.

A modern-day Turing would probably put his wealth in Bitcoin — and then lose his wallet password.

I don't know what it is, but the thought of Turing running around Bletchley park burying silver ingots is hilarious to me.

Also, I wonder if anyone has found them since. Anyone with a metal detector up for a bit of a project?

It's possible the ingots are still there, but I think the more interesting bet would be "Do you think they were found before or after Turing went looking?"

It's not entirely beyond the realm of the possible that a security guard saw Turing bury something, checked what it was 10 minutes after Turing left, and then quietly pocketed the ingot when it turned out to be money and not a security threat.

Don't leave your money by a fence post in the snow either

well maybe it would be better if you marked which fence post it was with something that you'd have in your car like maybe an ice scraper...

What the heck do ya mean?

Think it's a reference to Fargo - a Coen brothers film and TV series

Both were: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KW9vmiop2YU

Oops

What about under a black, volcanic rock in a hayfield near buxton?

Or you'll lose it by an off-by-one error.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-by-one_error#Fencepost_err...

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