The ‘Sumerian Lyre Puzzle’ is one of the puzzles of the museum.
Description[]
The Sumerian Lyre puzzle is, with out a doubt, one of the most frustrating puzzles in the museum. Being located in the replica of a Sumerian Temple, it stand near the back wall, and is a fully functional lyre. Solving this puzzle allows you to access a hiding spot in the oxen statue in the temple, where one vessel piece will be hidden.
The Puzzle[]
From the moment you touch the blue orb on the lyre, you’ve begun on of the most aggravating, and one of the most used types of puzzles. The lyre has eight strings, and ten little blue lights on the bottom of it, and each one of those lights light up after you complete a tone sequence. The first light takes a three string chain to finish, and each light illuminates by repeating the chain with an additional tone. By the end of the puzzle, the chain is twelve tones long.
With eight strings on the lyre, it is almost impossible to predict what chain will be the one to expect, so it is left to be a game of Simon. As the chain gets longer, it gets harder to remember. If you want to get an idea of how hard it can be to predict, or even remember, keep this in mind. There are eight tones, and it is possible for tones to be repeated. The first chain is 1 out of 512 combinations, while the longest will be a 1 out of 68,719,476,736 combinations. This is truly frustrating puzzle, if your memory is not sharp, or you don’t keep track of the tones. One mistake, and you start all over from the beginning of the chain, a devastating fact if you are one tone away from full completion.
Real Life Examples[]
This puzzle has shown up everywhere, even before computers were using it. One of the earliest examples of this is the game Simon, where the number of choices is four. Since then, it has been found in various computer puzzle games, sometimes with a preset pattern, and other times with random chains. One such example of a long chain it the five frog choir in Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. Five tones, and the chain has gotten as long as twenty tones, and it is split second timing for each tone.