17 Mystery Cache

Here is a little background on the title of this cache. About 30 years ago I worked with an electrical engineer who ran the standards lab where we were employed. This guy was great with numbers, statistics, and methodology. He told me he had a theory that the number 17, which most people consider a random (and prime) number, wasn’t random at all because it seems to appear with greater frequency than the other numbers around it.

As an example, studies have shown that if people are asked to pick a number between 1 and 20, 17 is by far the most common choice, even beating out 7 by a wide margin. While some will argue that human beings aren’t the most reliable random number generators, this is still a fact. check reference

There are cryptology sites that discuss the randomness of 17 as well. cryptographic link

-17 is known as the Feller number, after the famous mathematician William Feller who taught at Princeton University for many years. Feller would say, when discussing an unsolved mathematical problem, that if it could be proved for the case n = 17 then it could be proved for all positive integers n. He would also say in lectures, "Let's try this for an arbitrary value of n, say n=17."
-Similar to Feller, Prof. Vadim Khayms of Stanford University is also known to use 17 as an arbitrary value during lectures. His Computational Mathematics for Engineers course includes 17 lectures.
-It is believed that the minimum possible number of givens for a sudoku puzzle with a unique solution is 17, but this has yet to be proven.
-Then you have 17 year locusts, the list goes on and on. I won’t bore you with more examples, but if you observe the world around you, you’ll see what I mean.

When I was trying to hit “00” for a recent event in Concord, I was trying to reach 700 puzzle cache finds (actually the “Unknown (Mystery) Caches” category on geocaching.com) and realized that when I reached that plateau I would have 4117 finds. Those 700 puzzle cache finds would represent 17.00% of my total cache finds. I just finished by finding #700 today so I hid this cache to commemorate that milestone. Today’s date is 03-05-09, which has a checksum of 17. Coincidence, I think not.

The fine print
So here’s the deal. The cache is at the posted coordinates and is in the end of a guardrail less than 100 feet from lots of parking (or is it parking lots?) and the cache is unlikely to be covered by plowed snow-it is clear now. To log this cache you have to have previously logged at least 17 “Unknown (Mystery) Cache” finds and the percentage of those finds must equal, or exceed 17% of your total finds (NO rounding up allowed). Use the WINDOWS calculator under ACCESSORIES that gives the answer to 32 places, or a similar high precision online calculator like eCalc that gives answers to 13 places to get your answer, not a $17 desktop unit that internally rounds to 2 digits. If the number of your “Unknown (Mystery) Cache” finds divided by your total finds isn't greater than .17, you aren't there yet. Unlike some of the recent caches with ALRs, this cache favors those cachers who have fewer finds. You also have to meet the ALR requirements before you sign the log, no prelogging is allowed. In addition, “sock puppet” accounts are not allowed to log this cache. The container is a small round Lock-n-Lock container. Note: if the snowbank isn't there, and you can get over a slight low curb, this should be wheelchair accessible, a 1 star terrain.

While possible, it is unlikely that anyone else with 4000+ caches will log this cache for a long time because it interferes with getting big numbers. Before you say that this is going to be a hard cache to log, I can tell you that I did a quick check and at least 2 NH cachers already meet the requirements as do at least 3 MA cachers. There are probably a number of others (maybe 17 ?) but I just checked a few. One cacher actually has more than 34% of their finds as “Unknown (Mystery) Caches” (2x17%) and has several hundred finds. It can be done.