Crowdfunding publisher Unbound has partnered with an AI platform to challenge people to use artificial intelligence to solve Cain’s Jawbone, a literary puzzle that has only ever been cracked by four people since it was published in the 1930s.
Cain’s Jawbone is a novel by Edward Powys Mathers, who was then the Observer’s cryptic crossword compiler. It’s a murder mystery in which six people die, but it can only be solved if readers rearrange its 100 pages in the correct order. Unbound said the pages could be sorted to reveal the six victims and their respective murderers “through logic and intelligent reading”.
On its website, Unbound described Cain’s Jawbone as the “most fiendishly difficult literary puzzle ever written”. The number of possible combinations of pages is a figure that is 158 numbers long.
The novel became popular on TikTok after Sarah Scannell, a documentary assistant in San Francisco, did a series of videos on it. Unbound reprinted 70,000 copies after the TikTok posts.
Now Unbound has partnered with Zindi, an AI platform based in South Africa. Together, they are challenging people to put 75 pages of the novel in the correct order using natural language processing algorithms. Natural language processing is a branch of AI that looks at the interactions between computers and human language.
Amy Bray, Zindi data scientist and technical lead on the partnership, said: “Natural Language Processing dates back to the 50s but most models such as Bert were trained on modern-day language. I am interested to see what techniques will be used on Cain’s Jawbone as the language is 100 years old.”
The person or team that finishes the competition at the top of the leaderboard wins $300. The contest opens on Thursday and closes on 31 December.
Powys Mathers, who died in 1939, introduced the cryptic crossword in the UK in 1924 in the Observer newspaper under the pseudonym Torquemada.
As well as being a writer and cruciverbalist, Powys Mathers was also a translator, responsible for an edition of The Thousand and One Nights in the 1920s, as well as other books.
In 1934 he published a selection of his puzzles – crosswords, “spooneristics”, “telacrostics” and other verbal games – under the title The Torquemada Puzzle Book.
The final 100 pages of the book contained his novel-cum-puzzle.
John Mitchinson, publisher and co-founder of Unbound said: “I wonder what Edward Powys Mathers would make of the idea of solving his fiendish book-length puzzle using artificial intelligence? My hunch is that given his own freakish ability to spot literary patterns, he would have thoroughly approved.”
Two people solved the puzzle shortly after the novel’s publication, winning £25 each. When a copy of The Torquemada Puzzle Book was presented to the Laurence Sterne Trust, Shandy Hall curator Patrick Wildgust set out to solve it. Once he’d done so, Unbound reissued the title in 2019 with a £1,000 prize to anyone who could solve it within a year; the only person to do so was John Finnemore, a British comedy writer and the creator of BBC Radio 4’s Cabin Pressure.
