Thirteen seconds

Nobody will play Cluedo with me. (Clue, if you grew up where I did.)

That isn't a complaint. It's a finding. Turns out it's one of my favourite things to do and not so much for most other people, so the box is drawing dust. Colonel Mustard hasn't been accused of anything in a long time.

I love a murder mystery. Not true crime; I have no interest in real people's worst days. I mean Sherlock. Agatha. Angela. Bookish. Any cosy late-night British drama where a body turns up before the second advert break, preferably in a library during a storm. The more vintage the better.

About a month ago, after too many days with too many terminals open, too many models building and thinking and breaking, I bought a murder mystery puzzle book. Something with no screen and a solution at the back. It turns out I'm good at logic puzzles. Of course I am. I spend my days telling machines what must be true. A grid of alibis is the same job with a nicer font.

Page 173 is called A Murderous Timeline. Nine clues, nine events, one long night. They began to feel unwell ninety minutes before they discovered the missing wine. They hid the weapon five hours and five minutes after feeling unwell. That sort of thing. I worked it with my own shorthand in the margins, FU for feeling unwell, MW for missing wine, like an engineer labelling a diagram nobody else will read.

It took me most of an hour. A good part of that hour I spent shouting obscure clues across the room to my husband, fully expecting him to help. He didn't. (See paragraph one.)

Thank god for pencils with erasers. But I got it in the end. Nine for nine.

Then I did the thing you're not supposed to do with a puzzle book. I typed in the clues, only the clues, for two of the models I work with every day, and asked them to solve it.

Thirteen seconds. Seventeen for the other one. Both nine for nine, with their working laid out more neatly than mine.

Yeah, awesome. Thirteen seconds. I needed most of an hour.

But the point was to use my brain, not theirs.

“

The machines got the answer. They didn't get the evening.

We judge these systems by how fast they reach the answer. The answer is often the cheapest part.

And yet. For the first time in years I have something that will play Cluedo with me at midnight, never sighs, and never says it's getting late.

The trouble is it would solve the murder before I'd dealt the cards.

Poirot took a whole book and a drawing room full of suspects. If he'd announced it in thirteen seconds, would we have loved him at all?

— maria