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."

Comments

Eureka!

[shfted!]

Is this the part where Ed Pegg gets to run through the streets naked?

Thank you, Bill Cutler...

[kommakazi]

My life is complete. I may now die in peace.

it's pretty simple really

[kommakazi]

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.

Re:it's pretty simple really

[Uma Thurman]

More precisely, when the article talks about solving the puzzle, they mean finding all the possible solutions, not just one.

Re:it's pretty simple really

[Sparr0]

You would be amazed how not-easy it is to find even one solution for most people. Try this with the loculus, or with a set of tangrams, or with a set of pentominoes (which can be fit into, and cover completely, any rectangle of area 60 with both sides at least 3 units long).

Wrong...this is older

[Spoing]

1. Billy Og:
2. "So, Mr. Pterodactyl, how many licks does it take to get to the center of a -- " *CRUNCH*.

Computation

[GrahamMastaFlash]

Isn't it amazing that a computer could compute in minutes what has taken humans thousands of years to solve? We're in a time in which the sheer calculating power of computers can predict stress and failure in complex structures (FEA), lift and drag of fluid flows (CFD), and even the way a polypeptide will fold into a protein.

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!

Re:Computation

[OneFix]

While I want to belive what you say, I must point out that you are making a mistake. This puzzle is purely logical (mechanical)...the things you mention (market economics and human-drug interaction) are organic in nature...

Computers are good at doing mechanical computations, but we have yet to perfect computation of organic systems...as a matter of fact, some would say it's impossible.

Re:Computation

[Noah Adler]

We will soon be replacing our market analysits and physicians with programmers!

No, we'll be replacing them with programs.

Re:Computation

[kommakazi]

The only catch is that we humans have to have a pretty good understanding of a problem/puzzle/whatever in the first place in order to program a computer to solve it. The limit still really is us humans, that is unless we develop true AI, which I really think is impossible because of what I just said.

Re:Computation

[anthony_dipierro]

Isn't it amazing that a computer could compute in minutes what has taken humans thousands of years to solve?

And yet humans can solve in minutes some things which a computer couldn't solve in a thousand years.

Re:Computation

[Textbook Error]

You build a simulation. Right now this is still in its infancy, and these systems obviously have to prove their worth by producing accurate results, but virtual organ simulation is where things are headed.

It's very likely we won't have the computing power available to simulate these accurately for another 20 years - but so far there doesn't seem to be anything that would prevent you from, in principle, modeling organs on a sub-cellular basis and obtaining a reasonable simulation of their macroscopic behaviour.

Re:Computation

[rune.w]

Isn't it amazing that a computer could compute in minutes what has taken humans thousands of years to solve? We're in a time in which the sheer calculating power of computers can predict stress and failure in complex structures (FEA), lift and drag of fluid flows (CFD), and even the way a polypeptide will fold into a protein.

I will be more amazed when a computer actually comes up with its own algorithms to solve those problems. As it stands now, a computer only crunchs numbers once it's given a very specific set of rules. Without an actual person to define the scope of the problem, design the algorith, and sometimes derive the maths needed for it, a computer is pretty much useless.

Computers are helpful, yes. Computers are panacea, no... at least not yet.

R.

Re:Computation

[Dorival]

"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."

In the 60's I was a programmer/statistician with no medical background for a large group of physicians engaged in clinical trials of cancer chemotherapy. I created a simulation model of the human blood system that was able to predict the future toxic effects of the chemotherapy after only a few doses.

The doctors rejected it because I was not a doctor. My theory was confirmed 15 years later by others. My boss (the chief of surgery) had suggested I should go to Med School. The chief of Hematology liked my work, but only because it explained the findings in his own paper published in the Annals of Hematology 15 years before. At that time a physics student who had been blasted with cobalt 60 pellets had been brought to the hospital and as a young intern he had the good sense to run every test possible for 90 days straight. My model predicted exactly what he had seen. Even when the radiation source was removed the blood values continued to oscillate up and down on their own as the body responded according to my model.

The chemotherapists were erring in not accounting for the body's built-in response mechanisms, and they didn't want to hear it from me.

WRONG

[Izanagi]

Every one knows the world's oldest unsolved puzzle involves women!!

Re:WRONG

[CCIEwannabe]

Everyone knows the world's oldest unsolved puzzle involves women!!

Replace the word involves with is

Thanks for nothing!

[breon.halling]

Thanks for ruining it for me! I'd only made it to the 535th solution! =p

Same "kind" of idea, but different problem.

[Ayanami Rei]

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"

Do as I say, not as I do.

[Syncdata]

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.

Can we guess the original cuts?

[G4from128k]

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.

Re:Can we guess the original cuts?

[Tom7]

For example the fact that the vast majority of 536 solutions are bilaterally symmetric suggests

But the bilateral symmetry also explains its own frequency: each solution for the left half forms a complete solution when paired with any solution for the right half (assuming they use disjoint sets of pieces, if I understand the rules of the game properly).

They already are

[Froze]

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

Re:I thought

[squiggleslash]

The egg. Dinosaurs had eggs. They didn't have chickens back in those days.