Cain's Jawbone: A Novel Problem

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The novel has united people around the world in an obsessive quest to unearth the answer, generating online communities, prompting many to turn rooms of their homes into “murder walls” plastered with book pages — and inspiring one woman in Colorado to propose an artificial intelligence-based method for solving the novel, which is still in the trial phase. Had not the singer of Wimpole Street said that they were binding up their hearts away from breaking with a cerement of the grave?

Cain's Jawbone has been described as "one of the hardest and most beguiling word puzzles ever published. The following month, they printed 70,000 more — followed by additional print runs in the tens of thousands. Mitchinson and Wildgust have also reopened the contest to solve the book, and plan to hold another in 2023. Perhaps, once the competition is over, I will publish a piece on the interwebs about my process and the meaning of it all. Kenna Hughes-Castleberry, "A Murder Mystery Puzzle: The literary puzzle Cain's Jawbone, which has stumped humans for decades, reveals the limitations of natural-language-processing algorithms", Scientific American, vol.I can say no more on the subject, but eventually I was satisfied we were in possession of the correct solution. Wildgust told Mitchinson that he’d managed to unearth the solution by trawling through his vast network of booksellers and ultimately locating an elderly man in a nursing home who still had both his own answers and a signed note from Torquemada himself congratulating him for getting it right.

Edward Powys Mathers (1892 - 1939) introduced the cryptic crossword to Britain in 1924 through the pages of the Observer. I love that it exists, it’s fun to peruse, and I like having it on my shelf staring at me and me thinking, “maybe one day…” but that I’ll likely never solve it. I think what I was trying to say is that it may be very hard to prove (in a mathematical sense) that the one “correct” solution is the “only” solution. Had not the author of Wails of a Tayside Inn said of them that they were the living poems and that all the rest were dead?In these suspicious times, yes, I probably do: I’m receiving no remuneration or consideration for writing and posting this, I just think what Unbound have done is really damn cool, and figure it’s of interest to fellow puzzle/detection nerds. meaning that there’s far more to this than simply tracing the sentence continuation from one card to the next. Only three puzzlers have ever solved the mystery of Cain’s Jawbone : do you have what it takes to join their ranks?