Slashdot Mirror
World's Oldest Puzzle Solved
An anonymous reader observes: "The Loculus of Archimedes, the world's oldest puzzle, has been solved. It has 536 solutions. You can find the details here."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Is this the part where Ed Pegg gets to run through the streets naked?
He who laughs last is stuck in a time dilation bubble.
My life is complete. I may now die in peace.
that the world's oldest puzzle was how they got that filling inside of Combo's.
...it was the age old question of which came first, the chicken or the egg?
i dont even understand the goal, much less how to go about "solving it". this is some seriously arcane shit. any geniuses out there care to bring it down to sub-dumb level for me ?
Solving it = putting all the peices together to make a rectangle. The guy who did it simply wrote a computer program to try all possible solutions and record the correct ones (i.e ones that turned out a rectangle) Really it's like solving a puzzle.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
If computers can do all this and solve puzzles that have plagued our minds for centuries, where will the limit be? Perhaps one day the effect of a drug in a patient or the release of software into a market will be fully simulated through computation.
We will soon be replacing our market analysits and physicians with programmers!
I couldn't be less interested in the notion that a computer barfed out all possible solutions. Somehow I imagine we are being denied the real interesting part of this. What seems interesting is the parts mentioned about how certain pieces were always found in a pair. I'd also be interested in how one solution maps into another solution. What clumps and individual parts can be interchanged. Also, someone should do one that fits on the surface of a sphere. (though, probably already been done)
Every one knows the world's oldest unsolved puzzle involves women!!
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
Thanks for ruining it for me! I'd only made it to the 535th solution! =p
"Yeah, well, Dracula called and he's coming over tonight for you and I said okay."
like the three-color problem. we replace patience and time with a computer. nifty, perhaps even useful, but not very interesting, from a mathematical or even an artificial intelligence perspective.
The actually interesting articles like this one and the other science/engineering ones get like a dozen comments with most of them by drunk slashdot addicts who post for the sake of posting, while MicroGates-"look, I'm Neo" and fucking software pseudo-politics seems to catch all the interest on this site with two, three, even five hundred comments a piece (not to mention all of the "OMG! I just saw Gates/RIAA/Darth Vades smiling at me in my monitor" fucking panic-attack YRO claptrap). Where did all the geeks go and who let the FoxNews fans in?
The four color problem is a lot different than this puzzle because you have to define your shapes (topological relationships) in addition to checking properties of "joining them up"
THIS THING CAN TURN ON A DIME, MACROSSZERO STYLE ALSO FUCK BETA, ~NYORON
It would probably help your cause if you commented on the article, and posted your take on it, rather then engaging in an offtopic rant against the people you're so pissed off about. You could actually be engaging in thoughtful discourse, rather than furthering the problem that so vexes you.
This is just as offtopic as the parent, and I was going to post anon, but fsck it. Put it in your journal pally.
"Inattention makes clowns of us all" -Bean
looks to me like this "puzzle" was forgotten and someone came upon it from some old book. It's not like we've (and I mean mathematicians) been banging our head over this for a long time. From looking at it, this looks like a simple combinatorial optimization problem. Nothing to it... just throw come raw CPU cycles at it and anyone can solve it.
I think a more interesting tangram/tessellation problem would be the following. How should one divide a square into N pieces to maximize the number of unique solutions in which to arrange the pieces to reform the square? You could restrict the problem in various ways, like prohibiting annulus-like pieces. Anyone know if this has been done?
'Q' is for Dr. Tran
Wait -- I've just been informed that it's actually Locutus (with a t) and definitely not a puzzle. Never mind then. We'll not even concern ourselves with that.
you mean they solved which one comes first. im overjoyed.
The oldest puzzel is:
The Zoog of Ogg.
There may be 536 solutions, but the original creator started with a single solution in the form of the original pattern and order of cuts. We may never know the exact order and pattern of cuts that created the puzzle, but I'd bet we can guess how most people would attempt to create such a puzzle.
For example the fact that the vast majority of 536 solutions are bilaterally symmetric suggests that the first cut in the creation of the puzzle was right down the middle. I'd also wager that cuts that bisect fragments are more likely than cuts that nick a fragment. Such straight-line, bisecting cutting behaviors are more likely than cutting polygons out of the middle of the whole square.
It may be a math puzzle solved by a computer, but I wonder if we can learn something about how people think from it.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
There has been a lot of developement into finding self solving systems. Here is an article to get you started, then just follow google.
readme
-- The morphemes of your disquisition are ascertainable, but they have eschewed an ambit of transpicuous exposition.
Ok, so does anybody have a suggestion for a book or list of "classic" puzzles like this that might be fun to solve with computers/programming (doesn't matter if they have already been solved), that don't require more than basic high school math. I'm basically looking for something fun to do when I'm bored, but that will also keep my programming and problem solving skills up.
The other day I wrote a complete (and I think optimal) word-search puzzle solver (final solution relied on standard iteration interface with different iteration strategies for each 45 degree rotation of the grid), and that was quite a fun few days as I rotated matrices and thought about things in different dimensions. In all, not a gigantic accomplishment, but enough to amuse, and better than playing mind-numbing shootemups.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
I thought it was the one about the man going to saint Ives. Man I still cant figure that one out. Any idea when it will be solved?
What, exactly, am I supposed to learn from solving a puzzle like this?
mr.nobody
--Don't you wanna go where nobody knows your name?
536 distinct solutions
Including mirror and rotation, there are 666 distinct solutions. I think we've found or anti-christ.
A programmer is a machine for converting coffee into code.
Has anyone solved the Stonehenge puzzle? I bet most people don't even realise it's a puzzle.
Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.