Puzzles and Strange Loops - cognitive science musings on geocache puzzles

Sudoku, Crosswords, word riddles... our newspapers and grocery store checkout lines are filled with them, so there must be a large majority of us that enjoy these things.

I was never really a fan of any of them - for me, there was very little intrinsic satisfaction in attempting to solve a complex sudoku puzzle or completing a cross word.

Enter geocaching puzzles.  Besides the 'Traditional' type of geocache, there are also various different kinds.  Multi-caches, for example, lead you to walk/explore several stages, collecting information from historical plaques or secretly hidden containers that have partial numbers required for the coordinates of the final geocache container.  Earthcaches have no container at all - you instead visit a unique geological location like a waterfall, cliff, mountain, rocks with embedded fossils, etc., and answer a series of questions that require you to gather information on site (measure fossils, take altitude readings, examine the colours of grains of sand in the location, etc).  Answering correctly allows you to claim that Earthcache as "found".  Letterbox caches hearken back to the late 1800's, where people used to leave containers in the woods and give others a series of clues, rather than GPS coordinates, in order to locate them.

And then there are Mystery caches, or puzzle caches.  These types of caches never have the final coordinates for the container listed online.  Instead, you solve puzzles created by the cache owner in order to uncover the digits in the coordinates.

These have captured my attention lately.  When I was sick over the weekend, I turned to solving puzzle caches in order to pass the time.  The creative range of these puzzles is endless, and the methods of solving as unique as the puzzle creators themselves.  In order to get a feel for these puzzles, check out this one who's title and a string of strategically placed numbers holds the key to solving, this one that has something to do with knitting, or this one that requires specialized musical knowledge.

I have created puzzles before that require a simple answering of grammatical questions (e.g. Should it be <its> or <it's> in this sentence?) or a simple "I Spy" type of puzzle where people need to keenly scrutinize an image of miniature toys and look for hidden clues; I've seen seemingly unsolvable puzzles that are simply a mysterious image and a couple of extremely cryptic sentences.

I didn't start off liking geocaching puzzles - I would avoid them, preferring the traditional kind, for all I wanted was to get out and explore my city or go hiking.  I did, however, enjoy creating puzzle caches for others to solve.  There is a certain level of surprise delight when a stranger manages to crack the code of something mysterious I have invented out of my own mind.

Recently I have discovered that I experience a similar sort of surprised satisfaction from solving someone else's puzzle.  As I run through various options, ideas, and analogies in my head and on paper and suddenly one of them reveals numbers that make sense, it feels almost as if I've pulled back a curtain to a tiny corner of someone else's mind.  My mind has suddenly gone through the exact same 'motions', if you will, that someone else's has.  This is especially exhilarating when the method of solving is something uniquely devised by the puzzle creator.

What is it that happens in these cases, exactly?  It seems almost akin to Douglas Hoffstadtr's idea of "strange loops", first explored in his book Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, which I hesitate to even begin explaining.  This quote might be a good starting point:  “In the end, we self-perceiving, self-inventing, locked-in mirages are little miracles of self-reference.” (From his book, I am a Strange Loop).

When I create a puzzle, I create traces of a process that my mind went through and publish it in a physical form (words/images on a screen) that can be perceived by others.  They cannot, however, perceive the mind-processes that led me there.  At least, not from the physical manifestation alone.  The method of solving seems naturally so obvious to me, as the creator.  The particular mind-process that I can self-perceive is ever present in me, a part of my identity.

When someone else uncovers that same mind-process, it is almost as if they have somehow absorbed a sliver of my identity!  They have mysteriously arrived at a conclusion no one else but me could possibly arrive at, and yet it happens all the time.  We unlock slivers of others' identity all the time, not just when solving puzzles.  This is the essence of empathy, of communication in general.  Does that mean that the surprise delight when someone solves my puzzle, or vice versa, is an intriguing form of empathy?  Does the puzzle solver somehow 'know' the puzzle creator in a tiny, microscopic, but nevertheless intimate, way?

Douglas Hoffstadtr also wrote in I am a Strange Loop about the possibility of identity living on in other people after the original identity has passed away.  He writes poignantly about losing his wife, and yet eventually coming to the conclusion that a shadow of the 'strange loop' that was her identity still existed within him, as he caught his mind one day coming to a conclusion in a way that only his wife possibly could have.  Someone I was once very close to had a similar experience about me one day, and I actually wrote an email to Hoffstadtr himself, at the time.  Here is part of that email:

We remembered a dream that he had a few months ago.  He was searching for something he thought was treasure, searching long and hard, and could not find it.  I appeared in his dream, and brought him to where it was hidden in the ground, and uncovered it for him.  When he saw what it was, he was annoyed because it wasn't a 'treasure' at all, just something 'everyday'.  When he asked me, "Why did you bury it?"  I replied, in my childlike way, as if it were obvious, "So it would be treasure!"

The dream delights both of us, because, as he was recounting it to me the first time, he said "I have no idea how that came out of my brain... because that's exactly something you would say."  And not just what I said, but the entire circumstance, and the way I said it.  He said "If you ever want to convince me of the supernatural, that would be it right there." (...)

Somewhere inside his mind, there is a copy of my own mind - very coarsly grained, still, but clear enough so that it not only can look at the world the way I would, but it can generate something of my 'essence' all by itself! (...)

I was fascinated by the dream to begin with, but now there is a new level of fascination with it after reading I am a Strange Loop and realizing just exactly what it could be that caused something so delightfully wonderful and strange to happen.

It's truly miraculous and beautiful when you really think about it... that love, and closeness, causes our "pattern" to be copied into someone so faithfully that it can generate spontaneous musings of its own accord as itself and not as the other person... - me, personal correspondence to Douglas Hoffstadtr, December 2007

Perhaps this is the draw of puzzles, for me.  A glimpse into someone else's mind - a strange, lonely kind of microscopic intimacy, but fascinating nonetheless.