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."

Eureka!

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

Thank you, Bill Cutler...

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

I thought

that the world's oldest puzzle was how they got that filling inside of Combo's.

is it just me ?

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 ?

Wrong...this is older

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

Computation

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

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

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.

"solve" it?

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)

WRONG

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

Thanks for nothing!

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

so this is basically...

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.

Where the hell did all the geeks go?

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?

hmmm

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?

On to the next challenge

It will apparently take close to 400 more years before someone solves the Loculus of Borg.

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.

Can we guess the original cuts?

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.

Puzzle list/book

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.

Oh...

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?

Serious Question:

What, exactly, am I supposed to learn from solving a puzzle like this?

Actually...

536 distinct solutions

Including mirror and rotation, there are 666 distinct solutions. I think we've found or anti-christ.

There are older puzzles

Has anyone solved the Stonehenge puzzle? I bet most people don't even realise it's a puzzle.