Past related posts:<p><i>Beastly Clues: T. S. Eliot, Torquemada, and the Modernist Crossword</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29911071" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29911071</a> - Jan 2022 (3 comments)<p><i>Literary puzzle solved for just third time in almost 100 years</i> - <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/10/literary-puzzle-solved-for-just-third-time-in-almost-100-years-cains-jawbone" rel="nofollow">https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/nov/10/literary-puzzl...</a> (via <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045947" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25045947</a> - Nov 2020, but no comments there)<p>Edit: maybe we'll switch to that latter article from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain%27s_Jawbone" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cain%27s_Jawbone</a>. Wikipedia pages are fine when the topic is unpredictable (like this one!) and there isn't a good third-party article available (<a href="https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adang%20wikipedia%20submission&sort=byDate&type=comment" rel="nofollow">https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...</a>).
Here are some pictures of some pages:<p>p.15: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg</a><p>p.23: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/ODDenKQ.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/ODDenKQ.jpg</a><p>p.93: <a href="https://i.imgur.com/0vAvWYt.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://i.imgur.com/0vAvWYt.jpg</a><p>I suspect page 23 continues onto page 93, but that's about as easy as this puzzle ever gets. Each page begins and ends in whole statements and there's not, for example, any dialogue split between pages. The occasional poem fragment is the only easy clue you get.<p>The rest of it likely requires paying attention to the subject(s) and setting on each page and gradually assembling them. I have no expectation of ever solving it, and if I ever do get the pages into some kind of order, I doubt I'll be completely confident about my answer.<p>Some kind of NN model could probably be constructed that would do a pretty good job of getting it mostly in order. Somebody else might find that to be a fun problem, but I picked it up for its potential to be a long-term amusement.
The article talks about the number of possible page combinations as if it's a meaningful indicator of difficulty, but I don't think it really is unless you're actually trying to brute force the solution.<p>If you aren't just brute forcing it then the difficulty depends much more on the clues given to you in the book. (For a trivial example imagine if the pages were numbered - technically still roughly 10^157 possibilities, but it would be very easy to solve).
Possibly the first time I've ever laughed out loud at something in the Guardian:<p>"“The first time I opened the box, I swiftly concluded that it was way out of my league, and the only way I’d even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no one to see. Unfortunately, the universe heard me,” Finnemore said."
I wonder how a modern language model would fare here -- use something like GPT-3 to evaluate the log likelihood gain of stitching together each of all N^2 possible pairs, then merge greedily best matches until none are left. Totally within reach, I bet it could get at least _some_ of the order right.
“The first time I opened the box, I swiftly concluded that it was way out of my league, and the only way I’d even have a shot at it was if I were for some bizarre reason trapped in my own home for months on end, with nowhere to go and no one to see. Unfortunately, the universe heard me,”<p>Finally it's working for someone!
FTA:<p>- Just two readers managed to solve the puzzle in the 1930s<p>- three years ago […] Shandy Hall curator Patrick Wildgust embarked on a mission to solve it. Once he did<p>- John Finnemore […] was […] the only one to get the answer right.<p>⇒ at least the fourth time.
After studying this discussion it seems that the puzzle has been solved several more times: There is an active subreddit dedicated to it [1], with a handful of people credibly claiming to have solved the puzzle.<p>So "solved for just the third time" is likely not technically true, but the puzzle does seem to be very very difficult.<p>[1] <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/CainsJawbone/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/CainsJawbone/</a><p>(You can even find a digital version there, but it's not clear if clues have been lost in the digitalisation process).
Slightly off topic, but if you get a chance then John Finnemore's radio work is amazing. Have a look for Cabin Pressure, John Finnemore's Souvenir Programme and Double Acts. He is a very talented comedian and story teller, and apparently somewhat of a polymath.