Cache is NOT at the posted coordinates. You need to solve the puzzle below to determine its final location.
The most common "Black Box" mystery hides have background stories about planes flying at a given altitude and at a given airspeed and on a given course and then exploding at a given latitude and longitude, sending parts hither and yon, particularly the famous Black Box (which isn't really black at all). Then it becomes your responsibility to solve a number of mind-numbing physics equations regarding trajectories, mass, gravity, the coefficient of friction, and on and on, to determine its final landing spot, and thus the cache container. Well, LUCKY YOU!! Because THIS Black Box puzzle isn't based on any of that.
This puzzle is based on an abstract board game created by Eric Solomon, originally published by Waddingtons in the mid-1970s, but made more popular by Parker Brothers in the late 1970s. (As an interesting aside, it was inspired by Godfrey Hounsfield who was awarded the 1979 Nobel Prize in Medicine for his invention of the CAT scanner.)
The object of the game is to discover the location of objects ("atoms", represented by metal balls in the figures below) hidden within the grid (or "black box"), by firing into the box a minimum number of probes ("rays"), and analyzing the results. For this puzzle, you can ignore that minimum requirement because I'm giving you the results for ALL the "rays" fired into the box. You just need to locate the "atoms" within.
The rules are simple, but what happens inside the black box can get rather complicated depending on the location of the atoms.
There are three basic configurations (Hit, Deflection, and Reflection) and three sub-configurations (Double Deflection, Miss, and Detour) which are just variations of first three.
Figure 1 shows a HIT (designated by the letter "H"), which is a direct impact on an atom by a ray. A ray which hits an atom does not emerge from the box. The ray does NOT necessarily need to travel in a single straight line before the hit.
Figure 2 shows a DEFLECTION, which is the interaction of a ray not actually hitting an atom, but which passes directly to one side of the atom. The angle of deflection for this ray/atom interaction is always 90 degrees. In this figure Ray 2 (designated by the number "2") is deflected by the atom and exits the box as shown.
Figure 3 shows a REFLECTION (designated by the letter "R"), which occurs in two circumstances. If an atom is at the edge of the grid, any ray which is aimed into the grid directly beside it causes a reflection. Or, two (or more) deflections cancel each other out (the sub-configuration called a DOUBLE DEFLECTION). In either case, the ray enters and exits at the same location.
The other two sub-configurations, as shown in Figure 4, are the MISS (a ray simply goes through the box in a straight line from one side to the other, without interacting with an atom, as depicted by Ray 5), and the DETOUR (when a ray doesn't result in a hit or a reflection, depicted by Ray 6 and Ray 8). These may be single or multiple deflections, or misses. A detour has an entry and an exit location, while hits and reflections only have an entry location for a hit, and a single entry/exit location for a reflection.
Your goal is to determine the locations of each of the atoms in the two "black boxes" for NORTH and WEST shown below by utilizing the "H" and "R" and numerical ray designators around the box. There is only one unique solution for each. Once you have them solved, assign those squares with an atom the value of "1" -- and assign the value of "0" to all of the empty squares (you know where this is going, right?). Each grid square is designated by a ROW/COLUMN number combination (for example R3C8), as seen around the outside of the box. Use the ROW/COLUMN combinations for the NORTH puzzle to solve the NORTH coordinate, and use the ROW/COLUMN combinations for the WEST puzzle to solve the WEST coordinate. Using that information you should be able to come up with the final coordinates for the cache. Good luck, and have fun...
The final coordinates are:
N 33 5(R3C5R4C8R6C1R2C5).(R7C2R3C6R5C3R1C6)(R8C2R4C7R7C6R1C2)(R4C8R1C7R7C2R2C4)
W 117 4(R5C4R7C3R3C4R5C7).(R3C4R7C6R8C5R2C6)(R7C7R7C3R5C7R8C3)(R2C5R6C8R4C1R3C4)
You can validate your puzzle solution with certitude.