4 ms·

Here are some pictures of some pages: p.15: https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg p.23: https://i.imgur.com/ODDenKQ.jpg https://i.im

Here are some pictures of some pages: p.15: https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg https://i.imgur.com/xKRESSL.jpg p.23: https://i.imgur.com/ODDenKQ.jpg https://i.imgur.com/ODDenKQ.jpg p.93: https://i.imgur.com/0vAvWYt.jpg https://i.imgur.com/0vAvWYt.jpg I suspect page 23 continues onto page 93, but that's about as easy as this puzzle ever gets. Each page begins and ends in whole statements and there's not, for example, any dialogue split between pages. The occasional poem fragment is the only easy clue you get. The rest of it likely requires paying attention to the subject(s) and setting on each page and gradually assembling them. I have no expectation of ever solving it, and if I ever do get the pages into some kind of order, I doubt I'll be completely confident about my answer. Some kind of NN model could probably be constructed that would do a pretty good job of getting it mostly in order. Somebody else might find that to be a fun problem, but I picked it up for its potential to be a long-term amusement.

p1necone 5y ago
What about page 41 before 93 instead of 23? The poem fragment is actually the previous part of that poem. (https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/mary_gloster.html https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/mary_gloster....). Although the rest of the text outside the poem seems to match less... I imagine piecing together these literary references would have been much harder in the 30s compared to now where you can just google them, and ctrl-f the whole text of the book.
- thaumaturgy 5y ago
  Ah, you're right, and 23 continues onto 87. I was going off of rhyme and meter, and hadn't yet looked them up.
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ehsankia 5y ago
Aren't the big GPT models really good at knowing what comes next? Could they be used to instead score what the most likely next sentence is given a list of 99 choices? Given that, should be trivial to scan the 100 pages, OCR them, feed them to this ranking system, then order them based on the scoring metric.
- helsinkiandrew 5y ago
  > Aren't the big GPT models really good at knowing what comes next? Good at coming up with something that COULD come next and sound reasonable but the possible directions the story could go after each page is infinite. The storyline is likely to be vastly different from the 'real' story let alone the actual wording. See these alternate endings for Game of Thrones: https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-2-writes-alternate-endings-for-game-of-thrones-c9be75cd2425 https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-2-writes-alternate...
  - sdenton4 5y ago
    It's a generative model (in the mathy sense) so you can take any page and look at the model's probabilities of the first sentence from each of the other 99 pages. This should give some strong hints at least.
Apocryphon 5y ago
This reads like Ulysses, or what I imagine that book to read like.

p1necone 5y ago

What about page 41 before 93 instead of 23? The poem fragment is actually the previous part of that poem. (https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/mary_gloster.html https://www.poetryloverspage.com/poets/kipling/mary_gloster....). Although the rest of the text outside the poem seems to match less... I imagine piecing together these literary references would have been much harder in the 30s compared to now where you can just google them, and ctrl-f the whole text of the book.

thaumaturgy 5y ago
Ah, you're right, and 23 continues onto 87. I was going off of rhyme and meter, and hadn't yet looked them up.

deleted 5y ago

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ehsankia 5y ago

Aren't the big GPT models really good at knowing what comes next? Could they be used to instead score what the most likely next sentence is given a list of 99 choices? Given that, should be trivial to scan the 100 pages, OCR them, feed them to this ranking system, then order them based on the scoring metric.

helsinkiandrew 5y ago
> Aren't the big GPT models really good at knowing what comes next? Good at coming up with something that COULD come next and sound reasonable but the possible directions the story could go after each page is infinite. The storyline is likely to be vastly different from the 'real' story let alone the actual wording. See these alternate endings for Game of Thrones: https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-2-writes-alternate-endings-for-game-of-thrones-c9be75cd2425 https://towardsdatascience.com/openai-gpt-2-writes-alternate...
- sdenton4 5y ago
  It's a generative model (in the mathy sense) so you can take any page and look at the model's probabilities of the first sentence from each of the other 99 pages. This should give some strong hints at least.

Apocryphon 5y ago

This reads like Ulysses, or what I imagine that book to read like.