Answer: A Simple, Yet Seemingly Impossible Puzzle


Short answer to the challenge... The Egg of Columbus

(But read on for the rest of the story!)


This search challenge was harder than I thought… but for an interesting reason. I'll take the blame here-the question ("English 4-word idiomatic expression for something thought to be impossible, but shown to be trivial") is not exactly a cleanly defined, clearly answerable kind of question!

As a consequence, people found all KINDS of answers that I hadn't thought about.


Forest for the trees
Cutting the Gordian knot
Thinking outside the box
Keep it simple stupid
Hiding in plain sight
To square the circle
Elephant in the room
Needle in a haystack

And even some unusual ones:

Riddle of the Sphinx
L'spirit de esclair

Alas, while many are close, they're not exactly right. "Cutting the Gordian knot" has the right sense of a sudden rapid solution to an unsolvable problem.

Thing is, I hadn't thought of that phrase as a possible solution. So kudos to those of you who made all of these suggestions. I'd put "Cutting the Gordian knot" as a correct answer, with "Forest for the trees" and "thinking outside the box" as decent half-credit answers. (They don't saying anything about the solution, just the path to the clever solution.)


Out of the roughly 20,000 who read this problem, only 3 found the answer I planned: JacobM, Johns1111 and Amarek all found what I'd INTENDED which is such problem/solutions are called "The Egg of Columbus"—as in the sentence "That's a real 'Egg of Columbus' type problem.'


In the comments, Johns1111 points out that in German this would be "das Ei des Kolumbus," which is a transliteration of "The Egg of Columbus," and, in my opinion, quite correct. Congrats also to Amarek for also finding the same solution.






Answer: A Simple, Yet Seemingly Impossible Puzzle


Image of Columbus breaking the egg by William Hogarth (Wikipedia).


Search lessons: (1) First, as should be obvious, finding idioms is hard. People who searched in idiom dictionaries were on to something. That's a great strategy for searching out this kind of information. I tried a couple before giving up, hoping to stumble across it (which is what happened).


My big tip about long searches is pretty simple: Keep track of what you've searched for and found. That's especially true for long search processes that take weeks. I just kept an open text file with my "search notes" in it. It really prevented me from duplicating my searches and let me systematically eliminate possibilities.

Search on! (But systematically...)

Wednesday Search Challenge (Feb 29, 2012) Answer: Impossible, yet simple? | SearchReSearch


Title image by simlik (Shutterstock)