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Yes there are 10^157 possibilities but I suspect it's not a factorial process to solve it - let's pick a random page, we compare it with the 99 others and find
by Taniwha 5y ago
Yes there are 10^157 possibilities but I suspect it's not a factorial process to solve it - let's pick a random page, we compare it with the 99 others and find the one that follows it and the one that precedes it (198 tests) - now we have a chunk of 3 lets do the same again (194 tests) now we have a chunk of 5 (190 tests)
The result is more like 2*(99+98+97+....+1) tests which is ~10,000 tests something a person can do in a real amount of time - nothing like a 10^157 age of the universe sort of thing.
(of course there are going to be some pages that might have multiple potential subsequent pages - sentences that scan and make sense - so as there's more of a puzzle in there)
- thaumaturgy 5y agoWhile some of the pages end in a poem fragment that can be plausibly matched to a poem fragment at the beginning of another page, none of the pages have obvious continuations to other pages. Each page starts at a whole sentence and ends at a whole sentence, and I haven't spotted any obvious hints, like dialogue spanning more than a page. At the moment my plan is to cut the book up, glue a lightweight magnet to each one, get a couple of large magnetic whiteboards, and just stare at and rearrange them every now and again for the rest of my life.
- tshaddox 5y agoSince people have apparently submitted attempts that were incorrect, it seems likely that it’s not at all easy to verify whether any pair of pages is correct.