Einstein diffraction and distraction

Further analysis of the Einstein game has led me to believe that it could be modified as a test similar to Stanford Benet intelligence quotient analysis. I am not a proponent of basing peoples worth or their performance on a test such as that, however it does represent the ability to combine visually and logically to solve relationships. The game creates hints and uses those hints to determine if a puzzle is solvable. What I noticed about that process is that the determination that a puzzle is solvable with the number of hints provided is assessed in a sequential and linked fashion. I could create a gate array which solved these puzzles with the given hints for the puzzle with a solution time that was guaranteed to be less than 4 nanoseconds. Having played it and looked at the code, I can now solve the puzzles in about 36 seconds consistently. It has a set of inclusions and exclusions that can be visualized. In addition it acts sequentially to a solution and this is due to the way in which the hints are generated. It is guaranteed that from a core sequence, there is a sequential application of rules that leads to a solution.

This game concept is similar to puzzles that are published in puzzle magazines and are usually text style games that deal with the association of positions and properties. They are something like this: "Mr. Green lives next door to the accountant. Mr. Blue has a black dog. The person with the red hat lives across the street from Mrs Jones." In this way they present the exact same type of puzzle that depends on inclusion, juxtaposition in space, and logical exclusion to define a solution which is unique. The content relationships in these puzzles can be more complex than the problems generated by the Einstein game, due to the fact that hints are generated by people and sometimes they will construct relationships that require the intersection of several hints to devise a solution. It could be possible to devise hints , or rules, that are beyond the ability of a person to visualize or imagine, and still be a valid solution which could be constructed by a computer program.

The analysis of real world data and situations require these same types of analysis. The greatest difference is that there is a great deal more ambiguity about real world information and the solutions often depend on relationships that are weighted on probability. In addition, the perfect exclusion that is possible with a limited probability set is not possible with the real world as that which we do not know cannot be excluded. I have been bitten by this several times recently and it demonstrates the flaw with the old Sherlock Holmes statement, "When all other possibilities have been excluded, the result, no matter how improbable, is the answer." What this implies is an absolute knowledge of all possibilities, which is absurd.