In this room:
- The coat and its shadow is an Easter island head. There was a famous fallacy people fell for of “The visible parts are heads, therefore they are only heads”.
- The dice door represents “gambler fallacy”.
- The salt and pepper door represent “salting the mine fallacy” or “black or white fallacy”.
- The pear may represent “appeal to nature”. The L instead of R in “appeal” (we want “pear” in it really) can be explained by the apple/appel in room 9 with “appear” in the text. The L and R between “appeaL” and “appeaR” switch to the opposite of the appLe/appeL and peaR. (Though there’s more to the word “appear”)
- The scissors represent “Splitting the Difference” a form of “False Compromise” fallacy, which involves cutting an argument down the middle assuming each side is equal when they aren’t.

But the scissors are pointing at the middle of 22. Cutting down the middle is not a “False Compromise” as each side will get a “2″ equally. The scissors are therefore not actually a fallacy meaning they are the correct door.

————–
.2.
Useful hints come from the word splits across new lines in text and in text under “…” (this website shows neither and the community seems to ignore it)

In the prologue’s first paragraph it gave “cupied”; a helpful hint as cup-i-ed showed how “i” doorway light selected “cup” in room 1.
The next one it gives is “dren”:
“dren” is an anagram and hint word about what “rend” means in this room.
The last letter of “rend”, the “d”, is what was affected. The right end. “Rend” is a portmanteau of “right end” (and it also just normally means “cut”).

Previously I wrote how the text explains cutting off the last letter of each line on bear sign to get S+Y+S+Y=88, then you divide by 4 to get 22.
The dren/rend hint is another clue that “rend” is about cutting off the last letter.

On the floor the shoes have a shadow shaped as a “quarter rest” music note. (The hat was a clue as some music rests look like top hats or are called bowler hats. There are 4 shoes in a group and that sign has 4 feet.)

So you “r-end” the feet of those 4 words/lines for 88 then “quarter the rest” to get 22.
These are same steps as my previous post just different route to it

——————-
Misc. Note.
Because of HAT in sacrificial tripod in another room; HAT gets removed from text when it appears on something. This is a rule across the whole house, gets used 4 different times at least.
EASTERHEAD-HAT= EASERED.
It has many good anagrams, I don’t know which is intentional. READ SEE, ERASED E, … unsure. Food for thought

1) Logic and probabilistic reasoning are not going to persuade you that your solutions are implausible, just as they played no part in convincing you the solutions were plausible. You simply imagine these things to be the kind of thing another person really might have intended, and are not receptive to feedback that this isn’t so.

2) This is a nonsensical application of probability, and although that won’t convince you of your solution’s errancy, I think it would be helpful to understand that much.

You can find numerical “solutions” for any door, in any room, when given freedom to interpret things however you wish. Nearly all such solutions would be hogwash, even by your reckoning, but they could still be formulated. Taking a part of an absurd solution, and asking, “What’s the probability this occurred by chance?” doesn’t tell you anything about the plausibility of the solution. The problem is, the probability that you can take arbitrary details and craft them into a solution of some sort is essentially 100%.

I assume you’ll think that’s a stupid or non-responsive answer to your challenge, but if you’lll think for a moment, and identify something you’d recognize as a bad “solution,” you’ll see that the chance of its exact elements arising by chance is very small. That doesn’t help us evaluate whether it’s real or not.

I will repeat what I stated before about my criteria for solutions. I believe that solutions should be accessible without reverse engineering, and most importantly I believe that a good solution looks like something someone reasonably could have designed for the puzzle. I recognize that the first solution you found in this room worked out nicely, but I fail to see an indication that it stands out from the noise.

Many other similar numerological solutions have been constructed and those comments go all the way down this page (and every other page.) Personally, I think this solution smells funny because it smells like a lot of incorrect solutions.

There are a lot of weird coincidences in science. The value of e^pi-pi is within 0.005% of 20. Even though this is very unlikely, I would not consider this an interesting experimental result, because (a) there is no indication that this connection actually means anything, and (b) it’s not replicable. Similarly, you have not demonstrated that your solution is likely to be an intended path; you have only shown that it was very unlikely for it to be there unintentionally. I suppose if we must approach this from a Bayesian context, these two probabilities are related by the probability that a real solution would be anything like this. I personally think this final probability is considerably less than 0.6%. You probably will not agree with me on this, but that’s fine. This book is up to interpretation, and this means not only am I glad you found a solution that seems reasonable to you, other people are not necessarily going to agree.

You might check the timestamps on Vince’s posts. He posted the apology after everything else.

If you aren’t interested in hearing alternate opinions and instead want to waste your time insulting people on the internet, I suppose I can’t really do anything about that.

Now, saying all of that, I won’t weigh in on whether this solution could be correct. Just that a tiny P-value (which, by the way, is likely larger than you think, because the assumption that all letters have equal probability is suspect) doesn’t necessarily mean it must be so. I will also note that the solution line taken, if intended, is highly specific and completely unlike any other solution in MAZE.

The probability of 4 letters on ends of words adding to 88 – which they needed for “rend by claw” (22) to divide it neatly to 4 – is 0.212% using uniform probability distribution for a-z, and 0.6% using distribution of last letter of words in 80k most common English words dictionary. That’s p<0.006.

The time gap between my posted room 41 solution and room 42 answers was 25 minutes. I did not not have an answer for 42 when I posted 41. I knew little about this room. I just did what the words said and it immediately gave the right answer. I didn't do 200 different p<0.006 chance things until one worked.

"Rend with claw" then looking at the claw pointing at 22 is obvious. Rend/cut meaning divide because 22 is a number is obvious.

It's p “”"”‘ I assured them I would help them to return. “You can count on me,” I said sincerely. Still, they wouldn’t leave anything behind. “”"”"

This says to count on where it is returning, twice saying it applies to the bear with sin (sin-seer-ly, “still”) so use the text in bear’s sign, not main text. Then it reinforces that there is no remainder after division. These instructions are all next to each other in the same paragraph further reinforcing relevance through proximity. It’s p<0.001 with all of this.

I need p < 0.05 to get published in a scientific journal, this is fifty times better and you are not a scientific journal.

Your first response is "this is not a product of rational mind", which you took back, but then committed to continuing with your low quality nonsense replies, forever saying whatever I wrote is wrong, while providing either weak or nonexistent proof.

You need to, using logic, explain why the p “”"”" it’s redundant for me to restate every time that what you’re claiming makes no sense. I know this is annoying, but I don’t want anyone coming naively to the website to think that your numerous recent posts represent the state of the field. “”"”"

Morally I follow tit-for-ten-tat with always cooperating/giving as much as possible at start. You trashed my posts with low quality nonsense maybe a dozen times, so I have no qualms now returning that. Equally I can educate readers about the actual visible ability I have seen from you, constantly, whenever you post, going forward. Equally I will justify this as protecting readers from naively thinking you ever have or can ever get anything right.

I could never justify (let alone comprehend) saying or doing such a thing unprovoked. But in game theory doing tit-for-tat maximises long term cooperation, which is good, and I’ve given tit-for-ten-tat which is most gracious. I recall my first response to your weak near worthless criticism was to give soft flattery and said you must know so much more since you did it so much longer.

I’m an honest person. If you show, here, that you are not dumb as sack of rocks, then I won’t be forever saying you are thick as sludge (in replies to you, dozens upon dozens of times, to whatever you post, sarcastically, in order to “protect readers” from thinking they should ever listen to or consider your ideas).

So show using logic why the p < 0.001 answer, that to me was so obvious it was first thing I tried, is just a coincidence. I'm not asking for your opinion/gut/feelings those are worth little from what I've seen. It must be facts/maths/logic/reason or something like those things. Take as long as you want, use all your 10+ years of experience; you don't need to figure things out in 25 minutes. But you do need to figure it out.

A few years ago, someone joined the site and spent some time posting a lot of solutions of dubious quality. Eventually they got bored and it became more obvious they were a troll until eventually they ruined the website with a complete trashfire set of posts. I don’t know further details because I wasn’t around then and the site admin showed up to manually delete all of them, which he very rarely does. Anyone who was around then can feel free to offer amendments to this story.

This person was the most malicious user I’m aware of, but it was difficult to tell some of their solutions apart from some serious solvers because the Maze community has been in a somewhat esoteric state for a while.

Manson’s recent puzzles in Blue Prince, all of which were entirely semantic, were a substantial indication to me and a few other people that this book is probably a book of word puzzles and not one of symbolic interpretation. (Note that our absent admin means all the “solutions” posted on the pages are ten years old and not nearly as verified as they’re claimed to be.) This isn’t a closed case, but I personally feel a word-based approach falls more in line with his other work, and given the quality of the Blue Prince puzzles it is a little more comprehensible that this book is 40 years old yet has no consensus on solutions whatsoever. To the best of my observation, Maze isn’t an ARG and probably was not designed with these tactics in mind.

Let me know if your approaches yield anything which could be a reasonable puzzle to design, or doesn’t require reverse engineering to solve. Your comments are getting reads. Anyway, if this puzzle book is anywhere near as bad as I think it is, stuff like this is more akin to a personal experience with a work of art than an answer to a clear-cut problem. And who are any of us to critique that?

There have been a number of times in the past when users have shown up, spammed the site with implausible nonsense, and not only refused to think critically but became antagonistic to critics. I started treating you like you were one of these people, but you haven’t been antagonistic to anyone.

I do expect that I will continue responding to your posts, and being dismissive of your proposed interpretations, even though it’s redundant for me to restate every time that what you’re claiming makes no sense. I know this is annoying, but I don’t want anyone coming naively to the website to think that your numerous recent posts represent the state of the field. I will do so more politely than I have been doing, however.