[extropy-chat] Petals around the rose

[Adrian Tymes]

--- gts <gts_2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> This puzzle requires only a rudimentary
> understanding of mathematics:
> 
> http://personal.baker.edu/web2/cdavis09/roses.html
> 
> Personally it took me 5 tries to figure it out,
> which I suppose makes me pretty stupid.

I didn't even need a single roll - except to verify my
hypothesis afterwards.  Spoiler space follows for my
exact method, but first: I've never had much patience
for this type of game.  Too often, it turns out that
the rules are simply made up on the fly.  (Not in this
case, fortunately.)  Plus, in most real-world cases
like this, someone else has already figured out the
answer and posted (or tried to post) it to a public
knowledgebase, so it's more reliable (and usually
faster) to seek out said answer.  This game is good
practice for investigating the truly
unknown-by-everyone scenario - except that one knows
other people have the answer, yet one is still
trained to repeat other peoples' research, even if
it's research many thousands of others have already
done.  Wasteful, I say.

That said, below is how to hack this rose.  (Not the
rules to the game itself, but an easy guide to how to
discover the rules.)












Procedure:

1. Google for "Petals Around The Rose", with quotes
   (since we're looking for an exact title).

2. Find
http://member.melbpc.org.au/~lborrett/computing/petals-j.htm
   at the top of the list.  Delight, since it's in
   Javascript: the code is available to the browser.
   Go there.  (We were actually looking for someone
   that flat-out explains the rules, probably someone
   who solved it after extreme frustration.  And I did
   find pages like that after solving it with this.
   But this is close enough by itself, given even the
   most basic knowledge of how Javascript works.)

3. View the source of the page, and look for functions
   which code for the game's logic.  Narrow in on the
   result-calculating section (with the helpfully
   labelled variable "Result" in this example; most
   variable names give a clue to their function, but
   this is better than average).

4. Translate this code into an algorithm expressed in
   English (or some other "natural" language one is
   fluent in).  Maybe consider a few alternate
   interpretations of what the code means, if one does
   not immediately recognize it (say, if one has no
   knowledge of programming).  Verify hypotheses
   against example rolls.

Now, that said...I don't know what they were referring
to about a clue in the game's name.  (Maybe some fact
about roses of which I am not presently aware.)  Nor
do I care much, with the game solved.

Given the masses of humanity, even very smart humans,
who need years to solve this very problem, versus the
mere minutes I needed (including time to come up with
a replicatable solution that does not rely on random,
and thus unreliable, inspiration)...I have to wonder
(though not too seriously) if I, myself, am part of a
prototype of the super-intelligence recently discussed
in another thread here.  I do try to optimize my
thought patterns (or more precisely, ways of solving
problems I wish to solve) in ways like the above.  ;)