Re: Riddles (was: Lateral Thinking)

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jan 06 2001 - 22:17:13 MST


Damien Broderick wrote:
>
> At 12:05 PM 6/01/01 -0500, Eliezer wrote:
>
> >> of is ... well, it's just dumb -- you had two keys to one of the boxes?
>
> >Of course. How else would I get two locked boxes each containing the
> >other's key in the first place?
>
> This is a *flabbergastingly* uninteresting `solution'. Why not just say you
> used a teleport machine? Why not say that the keys were tailored paramecia
> (one older than the other) that oozed this way and that? Why not say both
> locks opened with the same key? Several other proffered solutions
> (including both of mine) strike me as far truer to the spirit of the puzzle
> than this fudge.

Yes, but I went out and *did* it. Physically. To verify that it worked.
That's all that made it interesting! I would never have posted it
otherwise.

(I wouldn't use a blowtorch, since that might spoil the boxes' contents,
but I did think about using a gun or a sledgehammer to smash it open.
Maybe I'm becoming too attached to real life.)

-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:56:17 MDT