PuzzleMaze - P Gym, Chapter 4

Terms of Use/Waiver/Privacy/Policy

Perhaps I should write a privacy policy next. Well, I actually did this time :)

Seriously, tho, there are some things that need to be pointed out about puzzlemaze.org. And there is a Terms of Use/Waiver to agree to:

General

Some content on puzzlemaze.org may explicitly or implicitly, encrypted, hidden, or otherwise, describe locations of places in the real world if interpreted in a certain way ("simulated treasure hunting", "outdoor puzzle hunting", "actual treasure hunting", "armchair treasure hunting", and so forth). The most obvious, but not only examples, are explicit letterbox clues and maps.

YOU USE PUZZLEMAZE.ORG AT YOUR OWN RISK. YOU INTERPRET THE CONTENT ON PUZZLEMAZE.ORG AT YOUR OWN RISK. IF YOU LOOK FOR PLACES IN THE REAL WORLD BASED ON ANY CONTENT ON PUZZLEMAZE.ORG, YOU DO SO AT YOUR OWN RISK. THERE IS NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, ON ANY CONTENT ON PUZZLEMAZE.ORG

While it is intended that there is a safe, legal, trespass-free route to all of the locations described on puzzlemaze.org at the time of writing, there can be no assurance that there was at the time of writing or is at the time of reading, and there can be no assurance that, even if there is, that the encrypted writing will be interpreted properly (or was designed/created properly) to find such a route.

Possession of a clue, map, or otherwise encrypted or unencrypted descriptions of locations in the real world, or the existence thereof on puzzlemaze.org, does not imply rights of access to particular lands and route choices, or the safety thereof, including the location of a box, map, or described location itself. Always observe current local regulations, signs, property rights, and customs; you are responsible for your actions. Clues and other content are not intended to be taken literally or to suggest route choices; route choices (and the choice to proceed at all), are your choice. For example, use common sense -- if you think a clue says go "that way", but "that way" does not look safe or legal, don't do it. For example, ask permission before going on any property. There are other possibilities beyond the examples and descriptions listed here.

PUZZLES, CLUES, AND OTHER CONTENT ONLY EVER DESCRIBE LOCATIONS, NOT DIRECTIONS.

Simulated treasure hunting, actual treasure hunting, armchair treasure hunting, outdoor puzzle hunting, letterboxing, etc., like any outdoor pastimes, all carry the risk of various unforeseen and foreseen hazards. puzzlemaze.org/Randy Hall follows a policy of not knowingly describing locations or placing boxes in areas that will create an unsafe situation for the user of the content.

However, as conditions may vary, it is the responsibility of the user of the content to become thoroughly familiar with the conditions in the area to be searched, to adequately prepare for those conditions, and to conduct oneself safely and responsibly with respect to those conditions and with respect to his or her personal abilities and limitations. puzzlemaze.org/Randy Hall assume no liability for events which may occur related directly or indirectly to one's searching for a treasure, letterbox, or other location described on puzzlemaze.org

Do not let children hunt for locations described on puzzlemaze.org unsupervised. Children, do not look for locations described on puzzlemaze.org without the supervision of an adult who has read and agreed to this Terms of Use/Waiver.

Uploading Content/Offensive Content

In some instances, puzzlemaze.org lets users upload or post content. All such content must be "G rated", as the term is generally understood. No sexual, racial, hateful, bigoted, religious, political, or "spam" content is permitted to be uploaded.

Any such content will be removed as soon as reasonably practical after is is detected.

HOWEVER, BY NATURE OF WHAT THE INTERNET IS, AND THE WAY IT WORKS, SOME CONTENT THAT VIOLATES THIS POLICY (OR OTHERWISE OFFENDS YOU, EVEN IF IT DOES ADHERE TO THIS POLICY), MAY APPEAR ON PUZZLEMAZE.ORG FROM TIME TO TIME FOR BRIEF PERIODS, FOR WHATEVER REASON. YOU UNDERSTAND THIS, THAT IT IS IMPOSSIBLE TO KEEP A SITE 100% FREE OF OFFENSIVE CONTENT, AND AGREE NOT TO HOLD RANDY HALL/PUZZLEMAZE.ORG RESPONSIBLE FOR IT.

Special Risks for Certain Puzzles

Some, if not most, puzzles on puzzlemaze.org may be hard. Hard puzzles pose certain additional risks. These risks include, but are not limited to --

BODILY AND PERSONAL INJURY, PROPERTY DAMAGE, AND SO FORTH, DUE TO CAUSES SUCH AS BANGING ONE'S HEAD AGAINST THE WALL OR KEYBOARD, THROWING COFFEE MUGS AT EXPENSIVE COMPUTER MONITORS, INTENSE FRUSTRATION, INSOMNIA, MISSED WORK, AND SO FORTH. YOU UNDERSTAND THIS, AND AGREE NOT TO HOLD RANDY HALL/PUZZLEMAZE.ORG RESPONSIBLE.

Agreement

By reading/viewing/using any content on puzzlemaze.org, you acknowledge the above conditions, and accept responsibility for your own actions, and agree to hold non-liable puzzlemaze.org/Randy Hall, and further, agree to provide this disclaimer to any person with whom you share content from puzzlemaze.org.

Yikes.

Privacy Policy

So, what are people doing that they are so worked up about privacy over, and why aren't I having any of that fun?

Anyway, puzzlemaze.org pretty much logs everything you do on the site. It logs your IP address, uses cookies, and logs pretty much everything you type in. Otherwise, the permission/scoring architecture to unlock and score puzzles wouldn't work. Duh.

Puzzlemaster(s) or admin(s) may look at this stuff. It may get backed up. The server may get hacked, and it may get uploaded to a server in Romania, for all I know. Never type in or upload anything on the internet that you don't want your mother to see.

That said, I/puzzlemaze.org doesn't care about any of this stuff, except as is needed for the smooth operation of the games, the architecture, and the site. puzzlemaze.org will not intentionally or knowingly share it with anyone. There is also a process that purges it periodically.

Finally, certain parts of puzzlemaze.org allow you to buy content. All such transactions are handled off-line by Paypal. No personal details other than e-mail address and last name are logged on puzzlemaze.org, and that is solely for debugging and support purposes. For any such purchases, puzzlemaze.org/Randy Hall's liability is limited to a refund of the purchase price, or fulfillment of the content being purchased, at our option.

By purchasing any content on puzzlemaze.org, you agree to the terms of the previous paragraph.

Copyright

The contents on puzzlemaze.org are copyrighted. Alot of hard work goes into it. Don't take my puzzles, clues, photos, or other writing, and put them on another site, server, database, book, etc. without my permission. One major letterboxing/geocaching website operator put them in his database without my asking, and that simply wasn't polite. A minor magazine did also. Who knows who else has? (but we've got scripts now :))

While it is nice to be so flattered, it is nicer to respect my work. While I don't expect to make a dime off of it after considering the cost of creating content, running the server ad-free, and so forth, if you want something, pay me for it. I take paypal. Don't be an asshole.

And besides, what looks like a clue may only be part of a clue, misdirection, etc., and doing so will be misleading and incorrect. puzzlemaze.org is a logical and harmonious whole, and stealing pieces of it simply doesn't make sense.

Oh my. Time to go write some puzzles now. Maybe I just did. :)

Is Time Travel Possible?

20-Feb-2009

Geez, going from "Warm Up" to "More Challenging", in one question. My answer -- time travel to the "future" is possible, while time travel to the "past" is not.

To rephrase the question a bit, I define "time travel" with respect to a given individual; i.e., can a given individual travel into what he sees as the past or future?

Travel to the Future

The Theory of Special Relativity, discovered by Einstein, and as most eloquently described by the so called "Twin Paradox", gives us time travel to the future. This result isn't controversial. Basically, a clock in motion will run slower than a clock at rest (this has been verified by atomic clocks on aircraft), w.r.t. the frame of reference of the resting clock.

So, if I fly to Miami and back, I arrive back with my twin brother (as well as everything else) a little older, and thus have moved into my future. The effect is not noticeable on a commercial aircraft, but would be if I flew at speeds closer to the speed of light (traveling at about 86% of the speed of light, I would age about half as fast as my twin, so if the trip took 5 of my years (10 Earth years), I'd move 5 years into my future, and all things associated with time travel to the future, such as 10 years of interest accruing on my bank accounts, would be true after the trip).

A couple of notes. This is not "instantaneous" time travel. It becomes "more" instantaneous the closer to the speed of light you travel, but the question doesn't ask us to consider instantaneous time travel (FWIW, I find no evidence for the possibility of instantaneous time travel; I'm not sure if the Prof addresses this or not. And as in previous answers, I am not appealing to metaphysics).

Secondly, this explanation posits the possibility of building a machine that can travel near light speeds. In Question 3, I argued true virtual reality was not possible because complexity theory indicates that it impossible for the necessary machine to exist. It is possible that that a similar objection could be raised here. I don't know if there are theoretical objections to the possibility of such a machine traveling at meaningful percentages of the speed of light. But, as time travel has been demonstrated on aircraft, it is not really necessary. We are not asked to discuss degrees here. The last question, however, by its nature, required complete virtual reality, various degrees of it were not acceptable.

Travel to the Past

As for the past, I find time travel to the past impossible because the past does not exist, nor will it ever exist. There is nowhere to travel to.

Imagine being on a speeding train that passes under a highway. After it passes, you desire to go back to when the train passed under the highway. It simply never happens. You can't go back there (OTOH, you could take a very fast plane ahead to where the train passes under a highway in its future).

In physics, this is called the Arrow of Time. Conventional physics postulates that time flows from "the beginning" towards "the future", unidirectionally. It cannot be reversed. The irreversibility of time is based in part on The Second Law of Thermodynamics which basically says a closed system (such as the universe, as postulated in Question 1), always degenerates forward. In other words, you can't unscramble eggs (as Bertrand Russell put it). There is no evidence to suggest that the Second Law and the Arrow of Time are wrong. We will not be appealing to metaphysics.

We could speculate on undiscovered laws and physical principles. Perhaps time is actually a circle, and it will cycle back on itself, meaning a leap really far to the future will actually be a leap to the past (I believed this when I was a kid). We could postulate some sort of "quantum of time"; the smallest indivisible atomic increment, that time clicks along at, and that at each click, the state of the universe really exists "outside of time" and independent of our perceived movement of it. If so, it would seem theoretically possible to go to the past, as it would actually exist. We could speculate on any number of things like this, including a god that can teleport us to any point in time (and, as in the case of the past, make it exist). In this sense, any sort of time travel is possible, but there is no evidence to support any of these speculations, thus there is no reason to believe they exist.

Logic, not Physics

I have argued this from the point of view of my understanding of physics. The Prof implies he will be considering the logical arguments in this space. I'm not sure I'm up to that. I'm not sure of what they are, and part of the ground rules are to not look it up or do direct research. (And one other note on the physics -- the Theory of Special Relativity is tricky, and I have simplified things by assuming a stationary frame of reference on the Earth. Of course, the Earth is also moving, and perhaps we need to think about time travel relative to other points in the universe. I really don't think it matters, but my grasp of the physics isn't strong enough to be sure).

One of the arguments you hear against travel to the past is that if it were possible, why haven't people from the future come to visit us? This is a pretty stupid argument. First of all, how do we know they have not? How do we know we won't see evidence of these travelers next month? Why are we so sure society will evolve to this level of technology, even if the technology is theoretically possible? We could destroy ourselves next month, the day before the critical breakthru is made.

What about "time travel paradoxes"? You know, the one about going back in time and killing my grandfather, thus meaning I would never be born to do the deed. Well, the easiest way to dispense with this is my already argued belief that the past does not exist, thus such deed is impossible, resolving all such paradoxes. In fact, the existence of such thought paradoxes reinforces the idea that the past does not actually exist.

I don't have a good answer to time paradoxes like this. I'm more comfortable with the idea of positive paradoxes, such as a member of a race going back in time to found that race, as opposed to negative ones, such as the grandfather paradox.

It is easy for me to answer these questions, tho, as I believe free will is an illusion. In a system without free will, the will to act out this impossible grandfathericde would never exist, as it is against the laws of possibility. This is a pretty lame answer, but it is the best I can come up with.

Well, the questions are clearly getting harder. Time to see what the Prof thinks. I love this topic, yet it is one I am very poorly read in. As for the last question on brain in the vat, I liked it, but I don't think I wrote it up all that well. B+ for the philosophy, C for the writing on Question 3. I would have liked if the Prof spoke to the issue of reality for the vat masters and the vat, and the complexity theory surrounding the VR computer.

Worth Reading

The Arrow of Time by Roger Highfield (Suggestions that the past does not exist)
The Fabric of the Cosmos by Brian Greene (The best book on modern physics that I'm aware of)
The Butterfly Effect (One of my favorite time travel movies, but the sequel sucked)
Back to the Future (One of the most fun time travel stories)