Dagobert Steinitz and the Sacred Urns
The
puzzle is connected with a book called "The Legend of the Sacred Urns",
written by Paul Hoffman. In it the author "draws upon his unprecedented
access to the original research and writings of Dagobert Steinitz, an eccentric
millionaire who was so obsessed with the first world chess champion that he
changed his own last name to Steinitz." Preordering started on November
24, a description of the book is to be found at Steinitz
Press.
But
who is Dagobert Steinitz? The Steinitz
Puzzlers web site tells us that this man, born in 1925, was an anthropologist
at prestigious Isidore University in Connecticut. He spent some years with
the Nanahsnug, an aboriginal tribe in South America, and developed a controversial
theory about advanced hominids that walk amongst us and are responsible
for many of the world's unsolved mysteries.
His ideas did not go over well with his university colleagues, who dismissed
them as comic-book fantasy and new-age quackery. In 1969 Steinitz left the
university and retired to an old family chateau in the south of France. There
he created what became his legacy, a puzzle that, when solved, would lead to
three hidden urns. The first urn, Steinitz claimed, contained one million dollars.
The contents of the second and third urns remain a mystery.
The urn puzzle remained unsolved for the rest of Steinitz's life. For the
first few years, he would emerge from seclusion periodically to taunt those
who had failed to outwit him. He died thinking he had beaten the world, on
Christmas Eve, 2003.
At
the beginning of this year the clues
for the first urn were picked up by a computer programmer and amateur cryptographer
named Peter Lindman, who solved the puzzle. One part of it involved a chess
game, and Linderman was able to open a sealed box using the combination code
RXH7+, which is the algebraic notation for the final move of the immortal Steinitz-Bardeleben
game. An interview
with Peter Linderman provides more details on his solution of the first
urn problem.
What about the other two urns? And how does the quest proceed. Apparently
we have to wait for Paul Hoffman's book, which according to the dust jacket
contains among other things:
- The most complete and accurate [Dagobert] Steinitz biography to date,
including never-before-seen excerpts from his original field journals
- A rare copy of one of Steinitz's original puzzle invitations, as well as
the complete 1969 guest list
- An in-depth interview with Peter Lindman, finder of the 1st urn
- The author's own hypotheses regarding the locations of the 2nd and 3rd
urns!
A little sleuthing on the Web reveals that the book – if it actually
exists – is part of an elaborate $50-million Internet and TV ad campaign
for the Sharp Corporation. There is a full description of the puzzle on the
Morewasseen.com web site run by Sharp,
with an interesting Flash
Intro attached to it. The best way to start is to joind the discussion
of the urn clues with other puzzle solvers on the Steinitz
Puzzlers Forum. For Newbies there is an FAQ
page to answer the most common questions.
That is all we are able to tell you at the moment. Paul Hoffman is not revealing
any details of this virtual treasure hunt, even to close friends and colleagues.
The only thing we were able to get out of him is that the Sharp campaign will
have a prize worth about $10,000, and that he worked on the ad campaign with
Wieden + Kennedy and Haxan, the folks who made the movie The Blair Witch Project.
Paul Hoffman, puzzler and paradoxologist
Paul
Hoffman, known to these pages as a chess fan, writer, and TV commentator. He
also moonlights as a paradoxologist: an inventor of puzzles and composer of
mysteries. Not just any puzzles but diabolically hard ones.
Paul's most notorious puzzle was "Treasure", which was released
simultaneously in 1984 as a book, a made-for-TV movie and a laserdisk. The
puzzle included a number of mysterious pictures and images connected by a loose
plot involving the theft of a golden horse. The one-kilo golden horse, worth
$20,000, was buried, and the mysterious images were supposed to give instructions
on how to find it. The lucky winners would get the golden horse and $500,000.
The clues to the puzzle were interesting and obscure. Some were solvable,
and others were red herrings. There was a chess game involved, which turned
out to be Anderssen vs. Kieseritzky, the "Shower of Gold" game. But
it was not relevant to the solution in the end.
Treasure hunters went to great lengths to solve the puzzle. Someone at a credit-card
company traced all the places Paul had visited, and went and dug them up. “I
visited Crater Lake in Oregon, the deepest lake in the continental United States,”
Hoffman said. “It’s the caldera of an ancient volcano, and the
water is an iridescent blue. Well I stayed in a lodge there and paid with a
credit card. Pretty soon people were showing up with shovels to deface this
natural wonder in search of the horse. A sign had to be posted that said 'THE
TREASURE IS NOT HERE'.”
Paul Hoffmann (middle) anchoring the ESPN coverage of Kasparov vs X3D Fritz
in January 2003, together with GMs Maurice Ashley and Yasser Seirawan
Paul received a couple thousand letters a month from treasure seekers. One
woman was convinced that the horse was buried at the bottom of the Grand Canyon.
The only way to get to the particular place in the canyon was to pay to ride
on a donkey but she exceeded the allowed weight limit by some 100 pounds. She
dieted for a year and lost 110 pounds. Then she rode a donkey to the floor
of the canyon but she didn’t find the sculpted horse. "At first
she was mad, and berated me in a letter," Paul tells us. "But then
a month later I got a note thanking me profusely because for the first time
in her life she had gone out on a date. She decided that the treasure didn’t
really exist but was the love in a person’s heart!”
Nobody solved the puzzle in the five-year time limit, which ended at midnight
on May 26, 1989. The horse was dug up and the prize donated to charity. Seven
months after the deadline two men found the solution and dug in the right spot
in Tennessee Pass, Colorado. They found a vial with a congratulatory note inside,
together with a $200 bottle of champagne.
Links