
The Two Squares Puzzle - sohkamyung
https://www.futilitycloset.com/2019/09/28/the-two-squares-puzzle/
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alangpierce
An interesting challenge is to try to generate this puzzle, or one like it,
once you know the answer.

Given any existing grid, you can implement a "step" function in code that
generates the next grid describing it. You'll always find a cycle by stepping
over and over (the numbers can never get too high, so the space is finite, so
you'll always converge to a cycle rather than diverging). The goal, then, is
to find a cycle of length 2 (or, better yet, a fixed point that maps to
itself).

I just coded this up to try it out, and one simple starting point gave a cycle
of length 27. I tried randomly generating starting points and I can generate a
3-cycle but haven't hit any 2-cycles yet. So maybe there's another trick to
get the configuration from the puzzle.

Edit: nevermind, I misinterpreted the puzzle. All letters in the grid count,
so "FOUR F'S" has two Fs and an S. Accounting for that, a randomized approach
quickly finds a 2-cycle. But I guess it's interesting that a relatively minor
tweak like that has a different outcome.

~~~
abbeyj
[http://yawn.io/2019/08/28/pangrammatic-
autograms.html](http://yawn.io/2019/08/28/pangrammatic-autograms.html) was
recently posted here and uses a SAT solver for a similar problem. It seems
like that might be applicable here too.

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putzdown
I gave up, and boy am I glad I did.

~~~
specialist
Felt a bit like a typical job interview.

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Aardwolf
I wish puzzles would indicate whether it's something language/decimal-notation
based, vs something fundamentally mathematical based, before spending time on
it

~~~
umvi
And people say security through obscurity doesn't work! As you can see, it's a
_very_ effective time waster that can be layered _on top_ of existing
security.

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weare138
I don't think this would be considered "security through obscurity". Security
though obscurity is a security mechanism that relies on a secret only the
implementer knows about. Like hiding a key to your house under a specific rock
in the yard that only you knows the location of and hopefully isn't discovered
by someone else. A puzzle is solvable and would only protect you from people
who aren't good at puzzles.

~~~
umvi
I think it is. You are making the puzzle more difficult to solve by obscuring
what the object of the puzzle even is. If you don't even know what the goal
is, how can you start solving it?

If I gave you an AES-encrypted cipher and told you to crack it, you would at
least know what the end goal is (break AES). But if I just said, "crack the
following cipher":

a13908x91827p93892a...

Where would you even start? You could randomly try things, but the layer of
obscurity wastes your time such that you don't even know what goal is other
than some vague, nebulous "find the hidden message" goal.

Then I reveal that the cipher is actually just AES but with a layer of
obscurity on top of it using a quirk of the Afrikaans spoken language to
transform the cipher into a baffling string.

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amelius
These squares don't describe each other because you need external information,
namely of the English language.

It's like saying that 56 describes a house. Yes, page 56 of some architecture
book might show a house. But saying that 56 describes that house is just
wrong.

The puzzle is flawed.

~~~
dpark
I would go further and say it’s not really even a puzzle. It’s an interesting
construction but in no way is this a meaningful puzzle. There’s so much
knowledge that isn’t captured or really discoverable via the puzzle itself.
“Oh, it’s encoded English. Oh, the first letters are just excluded because
it’s convenient.”

This is basically not solvable unless you’ve been given a bunch of constraints
that aren’t actually part of the puzzle.

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mattmaroon
I don't believe anyone anywhere could solve that.

~~~
droithomme
That is certainly correct. The name of the blog is "futility closet", so...

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Bendy
This “puzzle” reminded me of Nick Land’s essay “Qabbala 101”, which remarks on
patterns found in “primitive numerization” schemes such as this.
[http://files.eshkolot.ru/C1_Nick_Land.pdf](http://files.eshkolot.ru/C1_Nick_Land.pdf)

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nemo1618
I think this is a form of autogram:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogram](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autogram)

The article even provides a pair of mutually-describing sentences. Hofstadter
has described these in at least one of his books, but I don't recall if he
discussed how to generate them.

