Petals Around the Rose is a fun game to bring out at techie gatherings, as many people have not heard of it. A few years ago I was visiting some friends at Startup Chile, and I decided to entertain four other people with this game. They were all highly intelligent, though the only one to not solve the problem is also the most successful among them. Go figure.
Interesting puzzle. I had to look up why the name was significant. The algorithm seemed pretty clear after a few rolls. Upon looking up the puzzle, I found I had a different algorithm than the one presented as a solution on wikipedia that resulted in the same output.
Edit: Which made the post's conclusion strange to me, if the name is not required to understanding the problem, why should Bill's interpretation be so surprising?
Edit2: Do people have other good examples of puzzles like this? I'm aware of Zendo [1] which is a similar inductive reasoning game.
The rules vary, and all these seem different than what I read in Martin Gardner's article. A quick and easy version of it can be played with a single deck, sheet of paper (to record the rules) and 3+ participants (dealer + at least 2 players, more is better, too many needs more decks).
I'm curious what algorithm you came up with that yields the same outputs but isn't effectively the same. I could probably create a formula that doesn't directly reveal the key, but it would really just be an obfuscation of the real rule.
Edit: Actually, I see one other interpretation that relies on bqq if rira (minor spoiler). I guess if you arrive at this first, the name seems irrelevant.
I played a similar game with some folks once, but I don't know the game's name. The person who knew the rule(s) explained that there was a planet that was like Earth, but it only had a subset of the things that Earth had. We guessed different things on Earth, and the teacher would tell us whether or not this other planet had them.
Some samples include:
Planet has apples, green grass, trees, runners, and cheese pizza.
Planet does not have bananas, plants, people, hamburgers, cats, dogs, houses.
I won't put the rule(s) here in case people want to try it.
I quickly hit on the correct theory based on the name of the game, but dismissed it, because the secret rule does not correctly match the name. The problem is pointed out on Wikipedia [1].
If you get a different result when you ignore the 1-face dice on a roll compared to when you don't ignore them, then the algorithm as you understand it doesn't match the algorithm that's the key to the game. In other words, you misunderstand how the solution works and haven't actually figured it out.
I rewrote this section to hopefully be clearer, but carussell is correct that if you think the secret rule doesn't match the name then you don't understand the secret rule.
Also, Wikipedia is a wiki. Anyone could have made this edit. I don't understand why people take the time to write on the Talk page about noncontroversial fixes but then leave the article untouched.
http://matuszek.org/eleusis1.html
http://matuszek.org/eleusis2.html
If you try it, this tip is really important: "Remember that rules are always much harder than you expect them to be."
And that principle applies to Petals around the Rose too.