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.