About the Snake-in-the-Box problem, an oracle told me

Once the search is in progress, something will be found

Three days later I got email from two people at a university in China who had found new records for Snake-in-the-Box in 13 dimensions and Coil-in-the-Box (a related problem) in 11, 12, and 13 dimensions. I posted their results to my leaderboard page.

The email from China was my first contact with anyone currently working on the problem. It felt good to know that people are still interested enough in Snake-in-the-Box to find new results and it felt good that they had found my web page.

And yes the timing is cute: the email coming on the heels of an oracle's terse response (that didn't say who would find something).

One day at work around 40 years ago, three of us were mystified as to the cause of a bug in the program we worked on. We knew we could track it down step by step but that would take a while and we were instead trying to deduce the cause in our heads.

We were stymied for a bit until one of my co-workers suddenly realized what the problem was. He said, "it's so obvious" and that was all he had to say. The rest of us then also saw what the problem was.

I still work on the Snake-in-the-Box problem but I haven't made any progress since February. Worse yet, I'm running out of ideas to try. I don't have anyone to tell me "it's so obvious" to spur me to see what I've been missing.

A friend asked if I'd tried the Eno cards, i.e. Oblique Strategies. I said no but I'd give it a try. I drew the card with the message "Once the search is in progress, something will be found" which is always true for broad enough readings of something.