Valley of the Green Glass Doors

Cer · Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2006 4:08 pm Post subject: Valley of the Green Glass Doors

You'll find other forums with topics about the Valley of the Green Glass Doors where post after post is written by users trying to figure out the riddle behind it, or posting new "examples" to see if they've got the riddle mastered yet.

Here are some examples of things that are in the Valley of the Green Glass Doors:

There's a moon but no sun.
There is blood but no vains.
There are teens but no children.
There is grass, woods, shrubberies and seeds, but nowhere to be found is a plant.
There are doors but no windows.
There are walls but no boundaries.

...anyway, it tends to take humans a long time to figure out the riddle, so as a programming challenge, it would be fun to have a program try to figure it out. Like, without the solution being programmed in, the program should analyze the characteristics of each statement and be able to find out the solution, and, maybe using a big list of dictionary words, pick some out of that and form its own additions to the list.

darkmonkey · Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2006 4:50 pm Post subject:

There are noobs but no elites?

mat007 · Almost An Agent Joined: 12 Jan 2004 Posts: 1375 votes: 2

I'm sure you've posted something like this before ...

Cer · Posted: Mon Jun 26, 2006 5:10 pm Post subject:

I thought I did too but I can't find it on here... I know I made a Juggernaut command that'd randomly send one of the "hints"

Mojave · Almost An Agent Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 1434

I'd never actually heard of that riddle before, but it only took me 10 seconds to figure it out. Must be my love of words.

The problem with programming a script to figure it out is that once you know the answer, you'll tend to program in that direction. I won't give it away, but if say the riddle is a semantic one, you'll program it towards semantics, if it's a syntactic one, towards syntax, some coded message, towards codes, etc.

To really write a script to figure it out, you have to not know the answer.

On the other hand, creating a script to generate riddle sentences is very doable.

Anyway, cool! I like the riddle.

eric256 · Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006 3:18 pm Post subject:

There are deer and sheep but no cows.

patrick · Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:48 pm Post subject:

There is me but no i don't get it Razz

Mojave · Almost An Agent Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 1434

People use toothpaste and shampoo, but no soap.

eric256 · Posted: Tue Jun 27, 2006 7:45 pm Post subject:

I got so excited by actualy figuring it out that i forgot to comment! lmao

Anyway I think you might have a better chance building a bot to do the following.

Spot is a dog.
Dogs have four legs.
All legs have feet.
How many feet does spot have?

If you could build a bot that understood those statments AND that question, that would be a pretty cool bot. We could call it an Encyclopedia bot. Hopefully able to answer simple questions. "What is the name of our Sun?" "How big is our sun?" "How many earths would fit inside our sun?" When you start to think about it you find that these are very tough questions unless there explicit answer is stored, the goal then is to figure out how to infer relations between data. I.e. if you know the suns volum is 100u and the earths volume is 1u then you know that 100 earths fit inside the sun. The problem is incredibly complex though, as "big" could mean diameter, volume, circumfrence, or even mass.

Once you can infere relations between words and sentences then you start to be able to build something that can tackle riddles. The problem with computers doing riddles is that riddles generaly rely on our common sense knowledge.

Mojave · Almost An Agent Joined: 01 Nov 2003 Posts: 1434

jeffohrt · Newbie Joined: 08 May 2006 Posts: 17

Understand no ... but there's a chap in the UK called Rens Bod - he specializes in Data Oriented Parsing ... an area of NLP that could answer exactly that style of question ...

mattaustin · Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2006 10:56 pm Post subject:

I was talking to eric about this a while ago. There is a "senetence parser" that breaks down parts of speech and shows you what links to what.

HELP US, HELP YOU!