As previously written about here I, like many others, thought there “must be” a way to solve the Eternity II puzzle… Not deluding myself that I would be the one to win the prize exactly (although there’s a possibility [1] I might have said during last year that I was “about 50% confident” that I would solve it…) but more that ‘surely’ it should be possible, that although no algorithm can exist that would solve ‘all’ problems of this class, that it could be solved by the combination of human intelligence and computing power. Stepping outside the system is what’s required to solve most problems of this type, and why computers are terrible at it (in general) and artificial intelligence is probably, not only light years away, but conceptually not actually possible.
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I mentioned previously that I’d decided to try to solve the Eternity II puzzle game and write a ‘solver’ for it, possibly using some kind of AI. Of course, I haven’t yet found a solution, though I do have a couple of promising approaches. The ‘final’ deadline is December 31st and it won’t be solved by then, though it would be nice to see them extend it for another year (no-one has yet won, and it would be much more satisfying from both a company and buyer perspective to have a winner, rather than it just be abandoned!) but I don’t know if this will happen. See what happens when we get a few days off over Christmas!! You’d think trying to solve a (seemingly) intractable problem (the general class of problems like Eternity II must surely be NP-complete, so an AI approach might come up with a “very good” solution but won’t guarantee to find the exact solution, though it may do of course…) would be quite frustrating and frankly a waste of time but in fact there’s a certain stubbornness and determination that “no-one can solve that, I can solve it!” amongst people like me that makes problems like this almost more worthwhile to work on than mundane things like a ‘solver’ for those sliding number puzzles. What bothers me about all this though is that although an AI algorithm might “happen” across an exact or at least very good solution (which I’d then be tempted to tweak by hand) it’s a fuzzy approach by nature in that a solution evolves or is stumbled across; what I’d really like is to truly understand the puzzle to the extent that a solver could find all possible solutions based on a deep structure or rule. Where I’m starting to look is the number of solutions they mentioned that there are, and how else this number can be generated. I’ve been a bit quiet lately as (among other things) I’ve been foolish enough to start work on a ‘solver’ for Eternity II (TM) – a puzzle game similar to a jigsaw in which 256 numbered pieces have to be re-assembled onto a 16×16 board so that all edges match (the website gives a lot more details), basically it’s a special case of the edge matching problems class with the solution being an arrangement of the pieces so that all 480 edges match in terms of pattern and colour. (The rules of the game say that entrants are not allowed to disclose any of the details of the pieces or of any solution so the information I’ve put here is quite general.) → view the rest of the post: Disclaimer: I am not a financial, tax or legal adviser and this post should not be interpreted as advice – so do not take (or refrain from taking) any action based only on the information in this post. Investing money exposes you to the risk of sustaining a loss. Seek advice from a qualified professional if required. With the Global Financial Crisis and its associated fallout one of the consequences is of course that interest rates in the UK are currently at a “historical low” 0f 0.5 % for the 13th month in a row and inflation at 3.5 % as of the latest numbers.
As a saver finding that interest rates on offer with instant access accounts don’t actually provide a return in real terms I decided in spite of inertia and learned helplessness to look at other options. → view the rest of the post: Some time ago I came across the Wordle site which takes a URL or some text as input and outputs a frequency map similar to the one below according to the frequency of different words in the text being queried. (There are various options such as colour, layout, ignore common words such as ‘and’, etc.) Some people also use Wordle to create images of text by directly specifying the words they want to appear in it (and with what frequency), for example to use as a graphical element on a T-shirt etc. → view the rest of the post: |
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