Over the past month I've been focusing much less on the number of potential matches in clusters, and more on interpretation of "where warm waters halt". Mr. Fenn instructs seekers to do this rather than wasting time on what the other clues might tell us. In doing so, I've found perhaps a couple of high probability locations that are of very strong interest to me.
E.C. Waters was a steamship in Yellowstone Lake which was abandoned and later burned at Stevenson Island. Several ideas in the book and the fact that it was a steamship suggested to me this is "where warm waters halt". Another clue from Mr. Fenn, "not associated with any structure", may have killed this idea before it grew popularity.
And then recently, this idea popped up using a foreign language translation kit of words and can also be supported by several ideas in the book. "Agua tibia" is Spanish for "warm water". What if Mr. Fenn used these Spanish words as his key? I started to follow this line of thinking.
Mr. Fenn was an amateur archaeologist, and is no stranger to bones. He suggested he changed his poem to remove a line referencing "leaving" his "bones" behind after taking the chest. Tibia is a bone in one's calf. There is a chapter in The Thrill of the Chase titled "Bessie and Me" where Mr. Fenn describes his relationship with his fawn-colored calf, Bessie. The calf is home to a tibia. This could refer to his clue of "below the home of Brown". If one begins where a tibia halts, one may be at a knee ("The Knees" at the Sleeping Ute Mountains in Colorado) or below the tibia, an ankle... Talus is Latin for the anklebone, the equivalent "bone term" of a tibia. Talus is also a geological term for referencing a large mass of rocks at the base of a cliff.
Nine Mile Hole is a significant location as Mr. Fenn writes about his time fly fishing near West Yellowstone, MT with his father. There are two photos in the book of his father posing at Nine Mile Hole after fishing. Many people have visited Nine Mile Hole, but perhaps have not known where to look because of an incorrect interpretation of the clues in the poem.
There is a sign posted in Yellowstone National Park with the title of "TALUS" near Nine Mile Hole at a pullout location. It describes an area across the Madison River, and gives an educational definition of talus. Having noticed this when I was driving through Yellowstone this past Easter, it clicked for me. I now have this "word association" interpretation of the poem:
- where warm waters halt: agua tibia, go to the end of the tibia bone where one finds the talus bone, ergo the Talus sign at Nine Mile Hole
- take it in the canyon down: walk past the sign to the Madison River
- too far to walk: Nine Mile Hole, 9 miles is too far to walk
- below the home of Brown: could be Brown trout, might allude to Bessie the fawn-colored calf, calf is home to the tibia bone, points again to ankle, talus
- no place for the meek: be brave
- no paddle up your creek: no need to walk up Madison River against the water flow
- water high: in the Madison
- find the blaze: I wonder if the Talus sign is the blaze. If not, one may have to walk downstream a bit and look for a blaze.
- look quickly down: I'm going to guess that if the Talus sign is the blaze, the chest is in the river close by. If the blaze is not the sign, then I would be looking at trees for the blaze, near large boulders and rocks in or near the river.
Is it such a stretch that an amateur archaeologist living in New Mexico and having grown up in Texas might see the humor in "agua tibia" being the key to linking to another word like "talus"?
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Sunday, March 23, 2014
Break-through
I feel I had a break-through today on the Fenn treasure puzzle while contemplating a different puzzle from Duck Miller's The Whistle Pig. I'm going to return my attention to Fenn's challenge now.
Stay tuned.
Stay tuned.
Saturday, March 8, 2014
Game Theory
I like to think of the field of searchers as a spectrum, a Gaussian distribution if you will. On one end, you have the curious. These are people who have heard the story, assess their chances as immediately improbable. Or perhaps they live near a potential cluster of interest and search there for a weekend, but then they return to their lives having incorporated a bit of pop culture into their social currency. Heading more toward the middle of the curve, they might send a friendly email to Mr. Fenn thanking him for providing their family with some needed time away from the Xbox. I speculate these are the folks from whom Mr. Fenn enjoys hearing.
On the other end, you have people like Dal and Stephanie, two souls I admire and with whom I have never communicated. I have seen or heard their names in relationship to Fenn's chase in many many references. There is even one video where Stephanie asks Mr. Fenn "who has searched more", her or Dal. These are the folks the media zoom into with their own curiosity. They are outliers. I speculate they are the folks Fenn enjoys entertaining, enjoys watching them reason their way through with their views. I speculate he must relate to this behavior best as he has mentioned elsewhere. Plus he teases them with subtle hints like "you'd faint" if you knew how close you were.
Dal and Stephanie are, in my way of relating, the Thomas Edisons of the chase. Edison was often considered mainstream. He spent an enormous amount of time using brute force try-and-fail techniques experimenting with ideas. His process of acquiring knowledge of what didn't work paid off for him in many ways, but it was also a very expensive path with many fat-cat investors supporting his efforts. Repeating this type of behavior, risking more than $30K to find $3M, must require experience that these techniques have paid off in the past. This should also bring a level of confidence to the point where this behavior will continue to be rewarded. It would seem this behavior has already rewarded Dal. He can afford to brute-force his way through the chase. He is using, essentially, what is called a Battleship algorithm, like the game of guessing where your ship is... B3! Miss! Folks like Dal and Stephanie drive several thousand miles to their position, jump into a stream, and jump out empty-handed, never knowing for sure if they've come within 500 feet before driving home.
There are others, perhaps not as far to the "+" outlier side of the distribution curve. They work quietly and arduously behind the scenes, the puzzle solvers, the Nikola Teslas of the chase. Tesla competed with Edison by using his imagination, his math, and his wit to attempt to solve problems prior to investing. Tesla had very little means, was often viewed as crazy, yet many of his competitive inventions are either in full use today, or still being deciphered. "Imagination is more important than knowledge", asserts Mr. Fenn. It is the competition, the chase, that drives each of us to use the tools upon which we rely. For my tools, I am using math and NLP.
Bear with me as I frame it up to show why searchers fit a probability curve. If we view the chase itself as a math problem, and we first assume that the chest is truly out there, we know there is a finite set of possible locations within our sample space (Rocky Mountains across 4 states, above 5000 ft and below 10,200 ft). This starts to look like a topology set problem with a singularity of interest, an isolated point. Over 150K square miles of 10"x10" points are available for assessment. Only one of these points has our target, or b = {0}U[1,2, ... up to about 60 trillion possibilities] where b is our wise blaze, and {0} is our "x marks the spot" within the whole mess. Perhaps the so-called TALgorithm is an advanced form of life with brute-force Battleship-style physical point searching capabilities. Not likely if it puts us in Sand Dunes.
Diverting for a moment to another way to view it, a discrete probability of actually finding it, the search area could be represented eerily enough for "Fenn knowledgists," as Ω. If we think of each probable point as x within Ω, where Ω = about 60 trillion points, we can represent this with mathematical shorthand by saying x ∈ Ω. How probable is it that we choose the correct spot? Without clues, your chances of winning at PowerBall are better... 231,660 times. Attempting to solve probabilities of this magnitude is staggering as it is not be possible for a single person to visit all locations using a battleship methodology in any reasonable amount of time, even if we were to expand for "line of sight" adjustments. A good majority of searchers give up at this point because the clues themselves are pretty vague to be helpful. Perhaps Mr. Fenn knows this, and maybe this is why he suggests he hopes it isn't found now, but in 10,000 years. So we turn to less conventional interpretations of the clues to increase our chances, but also if our objective is to solve it sooner, we should turn to math.
Using cooperative game theory, we reduce our time, combine our capabilities, and improve the probability of finding it in far less time than 10,000 years. However, in cooperative game theory, the outcome is to find a Nash equilibrium between the players. I've seen it suggested on blogs that people combine their efforts. Intuitively, the more people involved, the less the reward for the individual. But is 1/10th of the payoff better than losing all of it? In treasure hunting, the allure, the chase, the goal, is to outsmart everyone else and to do so before someone else beats you to it. The treasure in hand is undoubtedly the winner. So perhaps it's just in how we view the problem and the goal. If we shift our perspective to collaboration rather than competition, the objective can be achieved sooner. But the chase is a competition. And so we each go our own way, most of us stop, only a few of us continue, and only one of us will find it.
Given it hasn't been found yet and the clues are so ambiguous, the probability of who will find it has increased significantly to be someone casually looking, primarily because there are MANY more of those than there are the hardcore searchers. That's what makes this more than intriguing, and I speculate it has earned a place in American pop culture. In doing so, I'd bet the chest is now worth much more in total than the sum of its parts.
On the other end, you have people like Dal and Stephanie, two souls I admire and with whom I have never communicated. I have seen or heard their names in relationship to Fenn's chase in many many references. There is even one video where Stephanie asks Mr. Fenn "who has searched more", her or Dal. These are the folks the media zoom into with their own curiosity. They are outliers. I speculate they are the folks Fenn enjoys entertaining, enjoys watching them reason their way through with their views. I speculate he must relate to this behavior best as he has mentioned elsewhere. Plus he teases them with subtle hints like "you'd faint" if you knew how close you were.
Dal and Stephanie are, in my way of relating, the Thomas Edisons of the chase. Edison was often considered mainstream. He spent an enormous amount of time using brute force try-and-fail techniques experimenting with ideas. His process of acquiring knowledge of what didn't work paid off for him in many ways, but it was also a very expensive path with many fat-cat investors supporting his efforts. Repeating this type of behavior, risking more than $30K to find $3M, must require experience that these techniques have paid off in the past. This should also bring a level of confidence to the point where this behavior will continue to be rewarded. It would seem this behavior has already rewarded Dal. He can afford to brute-force his way through the chase. He is using, essentially, what is called a Battleship algorithm, like the game of guessing where your ship is... B3! Miss! Folks like Dal and Stephanie drive several thousand miles to their position, jump into a stream, and jump out empty-handed, never knowing for sure if they've come within 500 feet before driving home.
There are others, perhaps not as far to the "+" outlier side of the distribution curve. They work quietly and arduously behind the scenes, the puzzle solvers, the Nikola Teslas of the chase. Tesla competed with Edison by using his imagination, his math, and his wit to attempt to solve problems prior to investing. Tesla had very little means, was often viewed as crazy, yet many of his competitive inventions are either in full use today, or still being deciphered. "Imagination is more important than knowledge", asserts Mr. Fenn. It is the competition, the chase, that drives each of us to use the tools upon which we rely. For my tools, I am using math and NLP.
Bear with me as I frame it up to show why searchers fit a probability curve. If we view the chase itself as a math problem, and we first assume that the chest is truly out there, we know there is a finite set of possible locations within our sample space (Rocky Mountains across 4 states, above 5000 ft and below 10,200 ft). This starts to look like a topology set problem with a singularity of interest, an isolated point. Over 150K square miles of 10"x10" points are available for assessment. Only one of these points has our target, or b = {0}U[1,2, ... up to about 60 trillion possibilities] where b is our wise blaze, and {0} is our "x marks the spot" within the whole mess. Perhaps the so-called TALgorithm is an advanced form of life with brute-force Battleship-style physical point searching capabilities. Not likely if it puts us in Sand Dunes.
Diverting for a moment to another way to view it, a discrete probability of actually finding it, the search area could be represented eerily enough for "Fenn knowledgists," as Ω. If we think of each probable point as x within Ω, where Ω = about 60 trillion points, we can represent this with mathematical shorthand by saying x ∈ Ω. How probable is it that we choose the correct spot? Without clues, your chances of winning at PowerBall are better... 231,660 times. Attempting to solve probabilities of this magnitude is staggering as it is not be possible for a single person to visit all locations using a battleship methodology in any reasonable amount of time, even if we were to expand for "line of sight" adjustments. A good majority of searchers give up at this point because the clues themselves are pretty vague to be helpful. Perhaps Mr. Fenn knows this, and maybe this is why he suggests he hopes it isn't found now, but in 10,000 years. So we turn to less conventional interpretations of the clues to increase our chances, but also if our objective is to solve it sooner, we should turn to math.
Using cooperative game theory, we reduce our time, combine our capabilities, and improve the probability of finding it in far less time than 10,000 years. However, in cooperative game theory, the outcome is to find a Nash equilibrium between the players. I've seen it suggested on blogs that people combine their efforts. Intuitively, the more people involved, the less the reward for the individual. But is 1/10th of the payoff better than losing all of it? In treasure hunting, the allure, the chase, the goal, is to outsmart everyone else and to do so before someone else beats you to it. The treasure in hand is undoubtedly the winner. So perhaps it's just in how we view the problem and the goal. If we shift our perspective to collaboration rather than competition, the objective can be achieved sooner. But the chase is a competition. And so we each go our own way, most of us stop, only a few of us continue, and only one of us will find it.
Given it hasn't been found yet and the clues are so ambiguous, the probability of who will find it has increased significantly to be someone casually looking, primarily because there are MANY more of those than there are the hardcore searchers. That's what makes this more than intriguing, and I speculate it has earned a place in American pop culture. In doing so, I'd bet the chest is now worth much more in total than the sum of its parts.
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
Google Forrest Fenn. If you haven't heard of him, don't worry. I hadn't either until it was time to field test.
I love google. Mr. Fenn talks about googling his father. He talks about leaving his mark in time. Google is a phenomenal set of algorithms created by thoughtful geniuses who not only understand how to build a remarkable index based on popular relevance, but also how to distribute the information across a scalable infrastructure... as long as it isn't required to be accurate or timely. I look forward to when google is able to crawl the deep web and discern relevance from garbage, and be able to free the information that is trapped there for various reasons. But more so, I look forward to when google is able to decide on its own what should be available immediately rather than just whenever. News releases are fresh, but so is something like a court filing or a campaign contribution. I look forward to when those are instantly available and aggregated through google instead of distributed and available after 30 days or more. It will make building a more timely network diagram so much easier.
In text mining Mr. Fenn's book, I have stumbled upon something I believe to be a clue within the same chapter where he publishes his poem. It is related to his fascination with collecting soda caps. Perhaps there is a gravestone marker which is also relevant to the poem, although he has stated specifically that the treasure is not in a graveyard. And a canyon with the word wood in the name is useful. In this case warm waters halting would be a former steam engine train station. Google has helped me with some research. But as Mr. Fenn states, it's best to be out there looking. After all, google won't put me on the 10"x10" spot.
I love google. Mr. Fenn talks about googling his father. He talks about leaving his mark in time. Google is a phenomenal set of algorithms created by thoughtful geniuses who not only understand how to build a remarkable index based on popular relevance, but also how to distribute the information across a scalable infrastructure... as long as it isn't required to be accurate or timely. I look forward to when google is able to crawl the deep web and discern relevance from garbage, and be able to free the information that is trapped there for various reasons. But more so, I look forward to when google is able to decide on its own what should be available immediately rather than just whenever. News releases are fresh, but so is something like a court filing or a campaign contribution. I look forward to when those are instantly available and aggregated through google instead of distributed and available after 30 days or more. It will make building a more timely network diagram so much easier.
In text mining Mr. Fenn's book, I have stumbled upon something I believe to be a clue within the same chapter where he publishes his poem. It is related to his fascination with collecting soda caps. Perhaps there is a gravestone marker which is also relevant to the poem, although he has stated specifically that the treasure is not in a graveyard. And a canyon with the word wood in the name is useful. In this case warm waters halting would be a former steam engine train station. Google has helped me with some research. But as Mr. Fenn states, it's best to be out there looking. After all, google won't put me on the 10"x10" spot.
Thursday, February 27, 2014
Cartman's Mom
I have a photocopy of the chest pinned to my wall at work. I put it there as a reminder to leave at a more reasonable hour and to allow for time in the evenings and weekends to continue this project. Lately I've been relating that image to another one, a spot that had an interesting probability that I mentioned in my first post, one which I had been researching with very little progress.
Today I received in the mail a book called Ouray Ice Park Guide, a guide to ice routes in a man-made ice climbing park in Ouray, CO (pronounced you-ray). The book is great. It makes me want to learn how to do this. I've seen a couple of mentions of this feature in other blogs but hadn't given it much of a glance until I looked up the meaning of the river on which this park sits, Uncompaghre River. Depending on one's preferred reference, Uncompaghre is presumably a Ute word for unca (hot), pah (water), and gre (spring). Further reading about the Ice Park suggests the creators have made a deal with the local government to allow them to tap into the reservoir on a dam of Uncompaghre. This deal allows them to spray the water into the canyon at night allowing it to freeze to the canyon walls. This attracts ice climbers. Warm water seems to be halting everywhere here in taking this canyon down. And Brown Mountain is a prominent peak near Ouray, with a very visible angle from the park up the Million Dollar Highway. You can see this from Google Maps street view. Water high and worth the cold is a bit obvious.
I couldn't find a clear list of route names in my research. I wanted to see if anything meek, wise, or wood related might appear. The book lists all of the routes. Almost 200 of them. Many of them are themed from the South Park cartoon, meaning if you have certain beliefs about foul language, you'll find this place a bit discomforting. My kids and I just laugh like juveniles who aren't supposed to be watching "that trash". Of the 200 names, maybe 1 or 2 qualify for potential matches in the poem (Jesus is synonymous with meek and wise, and I suppose a Sh*thouse is made of wood), but I'm pretty well convinced now from this list of route names this place is also just coincidental. It's just hard to imagine Mr. Fenn abseiling down an ice wall to hide a 10x10 inch box inside a finger crack, and then climbing back up with ice axes and crampons... twice.
And so I post it here. It doesn't mean I won't stop there to have a look on my path to where I think it is now, one of 5 spots just reduced from 6. The fifth spot will be my last place I will look. I know a lot about Ouray now. I've keenly searched the names of the trusts and landowners nearby from the free Ouray County Google Earth plot records. I wondered if Mr. Fenn might have purchased a plot. Not that I could tell. Plus the town is known as "Switzerland of America". How could I skip it? I lived in Switzerland for a while and blogged about that experience, too.
Monday, February 24, 2014
Over-thinking
Using synonyms against node feature names matched to keywords I tagged from the poem (this is why the probabilities are running amuck), and grouped with WGS84 datum (I like decimal for easier proximity checks, sorry) within a defined proximity tolerance, clusters of features start to appear.
I've read a ton of blog posts of other searchers, and this approach seems to be the most common and intuitive human approach for interpreting the possibilities. The math used to mine these results isn't a difficult task with the available data, and it seems proximity clusters can be visually cross-checked with other public sources like mapcarta.com or google maps. Consequently, this interpretive approach also seems to be the way the poem's author suggests is "over-thinking" the solution. Perhaps it is. From the results I am seeing, it would seem that "warm waters halt", "too far to walk" and "worth the cold" would be the highest probable clues for over-thought synonyms, and these might contain the highest significance. It is in these three clues where I will focus my attention in analyzing cluster results as their context seems to be oddly placed.
Here's an example of a cluster. It isn't completely sequential, but it could be coincidental. I thought "Sherwood" was a hilarious find with "brave=sure".
I've read a ton of blog posts of other searchers, and this approach seems to be the most common and intuitive human approach for interpreting the possibilities. The math used to mine these results isn't a difficult task with the available data, and it seems proximity clusters can be visually cross-checked with other public sources like mapcarta.com or google maps. Consequently, this interpretive approach also seems to be the way the poem's author suggests is "over-thinking" the solution. Perhaps it is. From the results I am seeing, it would seem that "warm waters halt", "too far to walk" and "worth the cold" would be the highest probable clues for over-thought synonyms, and these might contain the highest significance. It is in these three clues where I will focus my attention in analyzing cluster results as their context seems to be oddly placed.
Here's an example of a cluster. It isn't completely sequential, but it could be coincidental. I thought "Sherwood" was a hilarious find with "brave=sure".
| Clue | pc#352 - 67.77% | |||
| Feature | N | W | Elevation | |
| As I have gone alone in there | ||||
| And with my treasures bold, | ||||
| I can keep my secret where, | ||||
| And hint of riches new and old. | ||||
| Begin it where warm waters halt | Frye Lake | 42.7088 | 108.8775 | 8514 |
| And take it in the canyon down, | Sinks Canyon | 42.758 | 108.7965 | 6152 |
| Not far, but too far to walk. | Walker's Ditch | 42.7447 | 108.7862 | 6860 |
| Put in below the home of Brown. | Browns Canyon | 42.6977 | 108.7454 | 6663 |
| From there it's no place for the meek, | Wolf Trail | 42.711654 | 108.857243 | |
| The end is ever drawing nigh; | Fossil Hill | 42.7144 | 108.8482 | 9039 |
| There'll be no paddle up your creek, | Sawmill Creek | 42.708044 | 108.839133 | |
| Just heavy loads and water high. | ||||
| If you've been wise and found the blaze, | Weiser Knoll | 42.6541 | 108.6184 | 6588 |
| Look quickly down, your quest to cease, | ||||
| But tarry scant with marvel gaze, | ||||
| Just take the chest and go in peace. | ||||
| So why is it that I must go | ||||
| And leave my trove for all to seek? | ||||
| The answers I already know, | ||||
| I've done it tired and now I'm weak. | ||||
| So hear me all and listen good, | ||||
| Your effort will be worth the cold. | Cold Spring | 42.6759 | 108.7779 | 8084 |
| If you are brave and in the wood | Sherwood Point | 42.6186 | 108.826 | |
| I give you title to the gold. | ||||
| Quote: I said I hid it | Hidden Creek | |||
| Quote: I think kids have an advantage | Young Mountain | |||
Saturday, February 22, 2014
Begin it where...
About a month ago, I started field testing a set of text mining algorithms which combines map nodes with a library of English language synonyms. I won't go into detail of the reasons for the original intent of this work, but field testing has led me to "the poem". I thought: why not see if I can solve what hasn't been located by as many as 30,000 others?
I am now more than just intrigued by this funny little array of carefully crafted words.
The challenge is to find "context" within such a set of words, decipher the context with synonym possibilities, and assign probabilities as they relate to proximity cluster sets of map nodes within a distance tolerance. In this case, the author suggests there is also a sequential context. To this extent, interpretation of the results for sequential context must be applied such as with a TSP algorithm.
To start, I scanned his two books and converted them to text. I used a thesaurus software for synonym clusters. I used GATE and Mathematica (I also dabbled in Octave for specific fuzzy relational operations) and Groovy as my framework. Interpreting unstructured text and inferring context is a field I have been working in for a few years, at first indirectly, and more recently directly.
I then tagged the poem with location contexts and began comparing these with "clues" suggested to be sprinkled across the stories. Predictable patterns emerged, including specific focus on certain keyword relationships from the poem like "halt", "the end", "nigh", "cease", and the mysterious Omega symbols from the books (colophon). I observed heavy undertones of Turkish fatalism, but not surprising from a man who was facing his inevitability with witness of what disease had done to his beloved father.
I've been tempted to enrich my results by crawling blogs where curious treasure hunters have cleverly opened up comments to aggregate ideas. As I started down this path, I realized that introducing so much noise would lead to entropy. But, a word to the wise: search terms and general geo-references end up on blog stats. If you came here through a search engine, you're tipping me to your ideas. It's no different for the other longer-lasting bloggers who provide such helpful tips and insights (no offense, I get "clever").
The gentleman who has challenged me has architected a nasty little set of attractive red herrings which has sent many families into a thoughtless pattern of searching the wilderness inside 382,894 square miles. Thankfully he decided to narrow the search a bit more by restricting us to the USA, and then Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. And even more within a range of elevation: above 5K and below 10,200 feet.
Using elevation and boundary attributes with the map nodes helped to limit certain cluster prospects, but I needed to be cautious with this approach because "the end" node is in the target range, not necessarily the beginning. After reviewing these results, it started to appear as no sequential pattern was emerging. The clever gentleman appears to be using more visual queues than those recorded into well-known mapping software. I now fall into his classification of armchair hunter.
Here are several of my algorithm results which turned up some interesting clusters. I do this for no other reason than to describe the results of my math. I will keep playing but I have found separate reward in locating targets from synonym-encrypted sources.
... where warm waters halt
- Warm Springs Station, WY, Pony Express
- Warm Springs Cliff, WY
- the end of Luke Rd, at Yellowstone Lake
... canyon down
- Sinks Canyon
... too far to walk
- Sevenmile Hole trail
- Ninemile trail
... the home of Brown
- Hazelton, WY
- Brown's Pass, Hartsel, CO
- Brown's Park, WY
- Browns Mountain, WY
- Browns Canyon near Sinks, south of Lander
... no place for the meek
- Wolf Trail
... the end is ever drawing nigh
- Sand Draw Creek
- Sand Draw Rd
- Dinosaur Hill
... no paddle
- Skull this or that (scull)
... brave and in the wood
- Sherwood Point, WY
... worth the cold
Cold Spring
Other clues:
Children have an advantage.
- Childs Creek, WY
- Disneyland Rd, near Teacher's Rd in Pavillion, WY - what the hell is this place except an EPA risk?
I have a place in mind where children would enjoy that I'm going to check which required additional non-English synonyms. Most of the clues can't be found on the map nodes I have. Not sure if the gentleman knew this when preparing his clues, but if he did... extremely clever, and it would speak to why no one has found it yet.
I am now more than just intrigued by this funny little array of carefully crafted words.
The challenge is to find "context" within such a set of words, decipher the context with synonym possibilities, and assign probabilities as they relate to proximity cluster sets of map nodes within a distance tolerance. In this case, the author suggests there is also a sequential context. To this extent, interpretation of the results for sequential context must be applied such as with a TSP algorithm.
To start, I scanned his two books and converted them to text. I used a thesaurus software for synonym clusters. I used GATE and Mathematica (I also dabbled in Octave for specific fuzzy relational operations) and Groovy as my framework. Interpreting unstructured text and inferring context is a field I have been working in for a few years, at first indirectly, and more recently directly.
I then tagged the poem with location contexts and began comparing these with "clues" suggested to be sprinkled across the stories. Predictable patterns emerged, including specific focus on certain keyword relationships from the poem like "halt", "the end", "nigh", "cease", and the mysterious Omega symbols from the books (colophon). I observed heavy undertones of Turkish fatalism, but not surprising from a man who was facing his inevitability with witness of what disease had done to his beloved father.
I've been tempted to enrich my results by crawling blogs where curious treasure hunters have cleverly opened up comments to aggregate ideas. As I started down this path, I realized that introducing so much noise would lead to entropy. But, a word to the wise: search terms and general geo-references end up on blog stats. If you came here through a search engine, you're tipping me to your ideas. It's no different for the other longer-lasting bloggers who provide such helpful tips and insights (no offense, I get "clever").
The gentleman who has challenged me has architected a nasty little set of attractive red herrings which has sent many families into a thoughtless pattern of searching the wilderness inside 382,894 square miles. Thankfully he decided to narrow the search a bit more by restricting us to the USA, and then Montana, Wyoming, Colorado, and New Mexico. And even more within a range of elevation: above 5K and below 10,200 feet.
Using elevation and boundary attributes with the map nodes helped to limit certain cluster prospects, but I needed to be cautious with this approach because "the end" node is in the target range, not necessarily the beginning. After reviewing these results, it started to appear as no sequential pattern was emerging. The clever gentleman appears to be using more visual queues than those recorded into well-known mapping software. I now fall into his classification of armchair hunter.
Here are several of my algorithm results which turned up some interesting clusters. I do this for no other reason than to describe the results of my math. I will keep playing but I have found separate reward in locating targets from synonym-encrypted sources.
... where warm waters halt
- Warm Springs Station, WY, Pony Express
- Warm Springs Cliff, WY
- the end of Luke Rd, at Yellowstone Lake
... canyon down
- Sinks Canyon
... too far to walk
- Sevenmile Hole trail
- Ninemile trail
... the home of Brown
- Hazelton, WY
- Brown's Pass, Hartsel, CO
- Brown's Park, WY
- Browns Mountain, WY
- Browns Canyon near Sinks, south of Lander
... no place for the meek
- Wolf Trail
... the end is ever drawing nigh
- Sand Draw Creek
- Sand Draw Rd
- Dinosaur Hill
... no paddle
- Skull this or that (scull)
... brave and in the wood
- Sherwood Point, WY
... worth the cold
Cold Spring
Other clues:
Children have an advantage.
- Childs Creek, WY
- Disneyland Rd, near Teacher's Rd in Pavillion, WY - what the hell is this place except an EPA risk?
I have a place in mind where children would enjoy that I'm going to check which required additional non-English synonyms. Most of the clues can't be found on the map nodes I have. Not sure if the gentleman knew this when preparing his clues, but if he did... extremely clever, and it would speak to why no one has found it yet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)