Cain's Jawbone: Puzzle solved for just third time in almost 100 years (2020)
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29911071 - Jan 2022 (3 comments)
Literary puzzle solved for just third time in almost 100 years - https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/10/literary-puzzl... (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045947 - Nov 2020, but no comments there)
Edit: maybe we'll switch to that latter article from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain%27s_Jawbone. Wikipedia pages are fine when the topic is unpredictable (like this one!) and there isn't a good third-party article available (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...).
p.15: https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg
p.23: https://i.imgur.com/ODDenKQ.jpg
p.93: https://i.imgur.com/0vAvWYt.jpg
I suspect page 23 continues onto page 93, but that's about as easy as this puzzle ever gets. Each page begins and ends in whole statements and there's not, for example, any dialogue split between pages. The occasional poem fragment is the only easy clue you get.
The rest of it likely requires paying attention to the subject(s) and setting on each page and gradually assembling them. I have no expectation of ever solving it, and if I ever do get the pages into some kind of order, I doubt I'll be completely confident about my answer.
Some kind of NN model could probably be constructed that would do a pretty good job of getting it mostly in order. Somebody else might find that to be a fun problem, but I picked it up for its potential to be a long-term amusement.
Although the rest of the text outside the poem seems to match less...
I imagine piecing together these literary references would have been much harder in the 30s compared to now where you can just google them, and ctrl-f the whole text of the book.
Good at coming up with something that COULD come next and sound reasonable but the possible directions the story could go after each page is infinite.
The storyline is likely to be vastly different from the 'real' story let alone the actual wording. See these alternate endings for Game of Thrones:
https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-2-writes-alternate...
If you aren't just brute forcing it then the difficulty depends much more on the clues given to you in the book. (For a trivial example imagine if the pages were numbered - technically still roughly 10^157 possibilities, but it would be very easy to solve).
Yep, my first thought is the Rubik's Cube. Pretty much any scramble is equally easy to solve when applying one of the common solving methods, so the ridiculously high number of possible permutations doesn't matter at all in practice.
The fact that the white-green edge can start in 12 different spots doesn't matter when you just look for that piece and then move it into place. You take it all a step at a time. A "hard scramble" will barely affect solve time by a few seconds at most.
Having the piece in the right spot but rotated the wrong way is about as hard as you can make it, since then you have to "take it out" and "reinsert it" the other way versus just inserting it from elsewhere the proper orientation right away.
I'm not sure I'd go that far. For the most part, the difficulty level of twisty puzzles does tend to increase with the number of possible permutations. The big things I can think of that break up that tendency are jumbling and bandages.
It's just that the number of permutations doesn't give you a good intuitive sense of how difficult a puzzle might be.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain's_Jawbone
> The prize of £1,000 (roughly how much £15 was worth in 1934) will be given to the first reader to provide the names of the murderers and the murdered, the correct order of the pages and a short explanation of how the solution was obtained.
And they say dynamic programming has no real world applications.
"“The first time I opened the box, I swiftly concluded that it was way out of my league, and the only way I’d even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no one to see. Unfortunately, the universe heard me,” Finnemore said."
Finally it's working for someone!
The supermarket duopoly here has been killing off independant butchers so I suppose the classic meat raffle will gradually disappear too.
I mean part of me gets it, some meat (e.g. chicken) was getting too cheap - the €3,- a kilo chicken stunts caused a big outrage - and 'we' need to reduce meat consumption. But at the same time, meat is an essential part of a balanced diet - vegetarianism and veganism may be alternatives, but they need a lot more effort and headspace to make balanced, especially concerning vitamins, proteins, minerals, fats etc easily found in meat.
- Just two readers managed to solve the puzzle in the 1930s
- three years ago […] Shandy Hall curator Patrick Wildgust embarked on a mission to solve it. Once he did
- John Finnemore […] was […] the only one to get the answer right.
⇒ at least the fourth time.
>“Tracking down the correct solution for Cain’s Jawbone was a risky venture, and one peppered with possible pitfalls,” said Wildgust. “I can say no more on the subject, but eventually I was satisfied we were in possession of the correct solution.
Yes, I took this to mean he was looking for an answer key somewhere, and eventually found it.
So "solved for just the third time" is likely not technically true, but the puzzle does seem to be very very difficult.
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/CainsJawbone/
(You can even find a digital version there, but it's not clear if clues have been lost in the digitalisation process).
It shipped from overseas and, as usual, was stuck in US Customs for about a week, but this was in the run-up to the holidays. Might be faster now.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CainsJawbone/comments/qkiog1/free_d...
Docs, Slides and PDF.
But once you've done that I think there's an actual mystery to solve as well - probably something that requires an actual human to read it
> The number of possible combinations is a figure with 158 digits
The result is more like 2*(99+98+97+....+1) tests which is ~10,000 tests something a person can do in a real amount of time - nothing like a 10^157 age of the universe sort of thing.
(of course there are going to be some pages that might have multiple potential subsequent pages - sentences that scan and make sense - so as there's more of a puzzle in there)
At the moment my plan is to cut the book up, glue a lightweight magnet to each one, get a couple of large magnetic whiteboards, and just stare at and rearrange them every now and again for the rest of my life.