Petals Around The Rose

If you've been following the strange-but-funny idealogical war between Windows, Apple and Linux faithful, you've almost certainly heard that Bill Gates is stepping down from day-to-day activities at Microsoft. This has lead to some people praising Gates for his charitable work (he's stepping down to concentrate on his Foundation), while others continue to villify him, wondering at the hidden agenda Gates has in giving away his wealth.

Myself? I think he's a pretty smart guy to have been able to do what he did. He's also been very lucky. Anyway, what does this have to do with Roses? Well, some of you might know the game Petals Around The Rose. I certainly hadn't heard of it--until I came across an article about a young Bill Gates from Lloyd Borrett's excellent site, which provided an insight into his thinking.

The parts about Gates were pretty interesting (especially the last part--pretty funny, and a reflection about how programmers are lousy spellers); the part that grabbed me though, was the game itself. It was the first time I heard about it--essentially, the set up is this:

There are five ordinary six-sided dice that are rolled. There are only three pieces of information that you can have:

(1) The name of the game is Petals Around The Rose.
(2) The name is significant.
(3) The answer is always an even number or zero.

The Potentate of the Rose (the carney running the game who knows what the deal is) rolls the dice, and then tells the crowd what the answer is if they ask. Some get it immediately. Others never do (according to the Bill Gates story a lot of geniuses and math whizzes think up complex algorithms to try and solve it, but still come up with the wrong answer).

If I read the article correctly, Gates got it in the span of around three hours. After playing the game on Borrett's site on-and-off for an accumulated hour (and running scenarios in my head in the shower, which is where I work out the answers to most of the great mysteries in life, such as "How do I open that jewelled egg in Zork?"), I was able to rise to the level of Potentate. I won't give anything else away--it's pretty satisfying to solve it yourself.