AI Can't Solve This Famous Murder Mystery Puzzle

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May 09, 2023

Nearly a century ago, a crossword puzzle compiler invented a new brainteaser so difficult that only a handful of people have ever solved it. The project, a novel called Cain's Jawbone, requires the reader to find the solution to a mystery with six victims and six murderers—but first, the intrepid amateur detective has to put the 100 pages, deliberately written in a confusing style, into the correct order. In this week's main story, a writer decided to see if AI would be able to solve the mystery that has stumped so many humans.

Sophie Bushwick, Associate Editor, Technology

Arts AI Can't Solve This Famous Murder Mystery Puzzle The 1934 puzzle book Cain’s Jawbone stumped all but a handful of humans. Then AI took the case By Kenna Hughes-Castleberry

Food Here's the Weird Physics That Makes Peanut Butter a Liquid Yes, peanut butter is a liquid (and a great example of a non-Newtonian fluid) By Ted Heindel,The Conversation US

Biotech Proteins Never Seen in Nature Are Designed Using AI to Address Biomedical and Industrial Problems Unsolved by Evolution Bioengineers are drawing on rapidly evolving machine-learning tools, deep reservoirs of data and the firepower of a program called AlphaFold2 to pursue more sophisticated de novo protein designs By Michael Eisenstein,Nature magazine

History Who Invented the Measurement of Time? The first timekeeping devices were probably natural materials lost to the ages, but the ancient Egyptians were the first to leave records of their timekeeping methods By Stephanie Pappas

Energy This Pioneering Nuclear Fusion Lab Is Gearing Up to Break More Records Here’s what’s next after the U.S. National Ignition Facility’s breakthrough on nuclear fusion last year By Jeff Tollefson,Nature magazine

Space Exploration SpaceX Faces Reckoning after Starship's Messy First Flight SpaceX’s Starship launch site in southern Texas is now the subject of a lawsuit after the vehicle’s first flight caused concerning damage By Meghan Bartels

Biotech Bionic Finger 'Sees' Inside Objects by Poking Them A robotic finger’s supersensitive touches could probe inside body parts and circuits By Simon Makin

Artificial Intelligence A Brain Scanner Combined with an AI Language Model Can Provide a Glimpse into Your Thoughts New technology gleans the gist of stories a person hears while laying in a brain scanner By Allison Parshall

Genetic Engineering Synthetic Morphology Lets Scientists Create New Life-Forms The emerging field of synthetic morphology bends boundaries between natural and artificial life By Philip Ball

Space Exploration Japanese Moon Landing Attempt Falls Short as Spacecraft Goes Silent With an apparent crash, the HAKUTO-R mission from the private space exploration company ispace has joined a long list of failed moon landers By Meghan Bartels

FROM THE STORE Scientific American Volume 328, Issue 5

QUOTE OF THE DAY "Since the strike began, a number of writers have been vocal about this specific proposition, saying that they do not want it to become an industry standard to rely on generative AI tools at the expense of writers." Chloe Xiang, Vice

FROM THE ARCHIVE AI Designs Quantum Physics Experiments beyond What Any Human Has Conceived Originally built to speed up calculations, a machine-learning system is now making shocking progress at the frontiers of experimental quantum physics By Anil Ananthaswamy | July 2021

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