Jewels of the Oracle

I just now read three distressingly political items all having to do with political machinations. The first is about the DNC employing a broken arrow strategy against Republicans. The main idea is Republicans hold more state offices across the land by a very large percentage so for Democrat leadership, a desperate act becomes reasonable. Meaning, in a battle situation where your group is pinned down then you call in air support to bomb the whole area. That will also kill your own people but since your opponent has more forces then they suffer a greater percentage of losses. That explains the Harvey Weinstein and associated political sex scandals.

And observing that strategy fail miserably, the smaller number suffering greater losses is a beautiful thing to behold.

The second is about RNC organization, their analogy to regular business in relation to GOPe. Who does the investing, the planning, the managing, and who are the employees, and finally, we the consumers.

The third is about Hillary Clinton paying her lawyer to pay Fusion to pay British and Russian for a Dossier then pay journalists to run the bogus story.

And I was thinking, oh man, I don't want to post about that crap. It reminds me of a puzzle in Jewels of the Oracle that I didn't want to solve because it is ugly. The player is already in a basement. You touch your marker on a jewel shape on a stone door and it slides open with the sound of a stone crypt door, stone against stone. At the end of the room are vertical pipes with varying levels of water. The thick heavy pipes are connected. The player opens valves so water drains from one pipe to another. The object is to balance the water levels by adding and subtracting from the pipes. It's not straightforward. You have to add and subtract counterintuitively instead of directly. It turned out to be a lot of fun to solve.

Then I thought, what happened to that game? It's played on a CD. Computers at the time didn't hold that much information so most of data was kept on the disc. Then later computers don't have the CD drive. The disc is still around and so is a detached CD player, but pfffft. It's an old game. 1995.

Then I thought, how did I even know about this game? Why did I have it. I'm not into games.

I drifted back 22 years and saw it again. I'm running around town with a friend. We're planning something big. A party. It involves a lot of loose ends. We must go to a Capitol Hill apartment of one of his friends. Someone I know but not very well. I had never been to his apartment.

Nice place. Well designed. Expensive.

Upon entering we pass through a foyer were oddly a small table is set up with a desktop computer and with a computer game running. Who puts a computer at the entrance? We haven't even walked into to the apartment yet. The friend who is driving around town and this new friend had been playing. They were stuck on this challenge. They told me they were wracking their brains out trying different solutions but could not solve this puzzle. They looked for increasing complexities, they looked for curved shapes vs sharp angles, they looked for attached lines vs disconnected lines, they looked for designs with meaning, they looked for a message, they look for letters. Nothing is fitting.

I looked at the screen for fifteen seconds and solved it. Each tile is a mirror of itself. So what is the self being mirrored? It's simple as flakey farmhouse piecrust. Without saying anything I simply moved the tiles into place. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Ding. Solved. They both looked at me stupefied. "Jesus Christ, Dude. How did you do that?"

They think I'm brilliant.

I said, "It's the sort of thing you can overthink. It's actually mundane and very low level. This is a puzzle for children. This is a puzzle for idiots. And when you see it, you can just kick your own asses."

I showed them.

They both went from thinking me brilliant to becoming angry. At me! Both of them, especially the guy who drove me there became aggressively rude. Dismissively, "Well it takes a dumbass like Bo to figure out something this stupid."

How rude! "Look, I didn't ask you to let me play your game. You asked me to look at it. So I did."

"Well, we didn't expect you to solve the stupid thing so fast."

Whatzamatter, don't you read hieroglyphs backward and forward, sideways and vertically?

I love the design of this game, vaguely Mesopotamian, Egyptian, prehistoric, alien. 

This really is a fun computer game. 24 puzzles altogether.

There is no plot to it. No character. So it's not a game in that sense. Just a fantastic assembly of various puzzles. Most of the games have two settings, easy and hard. Some like this one are insanely easy while others are challenging. The maze on a cube is a major pain in the butt because your exit from one maze is the entrance to the next until the whole cube  surface is gone through. Then you get your jewel to add to the jewel set.

Others are variations of common puzzles that you played with as a kid. My favorite of those is the small flat plastic board that you hold in your hands that contains  sixteen spots for fifteen tiles with one empty space. The player shoves the tiles around with their thumbs. I can solve the plastic version of that thing in seconds by creating a train of tiles that makes a few loops around the frame dropping tiles and picking up tiles as it loops until boom all the tiles are in the right spot. You must think of the sections backward and forward.

My favorite puzzle of all in Jewel of the Oracle is a maze where you control a beetle pushing a ball of poo down a hole. The beetle cannot go backward, and can only push the ball. I've seen variations of this online but they're not as cute.

Pipe puzzle 3:37

I just now discovered that YouTube has all of the challenges in order. People explain all the challenges. Some are mathematic, algebraic, some are logic. One infuriating puzzle is logic that asks you to select items in a prehistoric room that go together. While all the items go together in some way, hunting, farming, preparing food, etc. The thing that makes it so hard is discovering their precise selection of objects and their reason behind their association. There are logic puzzles like this on the GMAT and LSAT verisimilitude practice books too. All those very thick books are fantastic puzzle books. But the logic sections are as much subjective as they are pure logic because the author rates the importance of elements. You have to take what is given and extrapolate outward the value or the importance of ramifications unspecified. And that varies greatly reader to reader. They give the answer, but they don't give the why of the answer so after all that work you score poorly and still don't learn anything, except the writer is a bit tetched. 

Now, you can download the whole game for free. And its followup, Gems of Darkness.