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What Is Meant By "brute-force"


Charlie777 & Gemini

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I don't know if it applies to all cachers, but I use this term when I fail to find a cache using the GPS, clue sheets, and phone a friends, and just begin ripping apart ground zero until I find the hiding spot.

 

It basically refers to a desperate last ditch effort to find the cache when time is running out. (i.e. the wife says we are done looking)

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and just begin ripping apart ground zero until I find the hiding spot
I agree with the other posts, ripping through everything until it's found. 

 

ACK! I could be taking that wrong, but that doesn't sound like responsible geocaching to me. It sounds like a few people doing caches like that could give us all a bad name and get caching banned in more places. :(

Leave No Trace!

 

Now to me, brute-force means getting an answer by trying all possible solutions until one works rather then actually solving the problem. In geocaching terms, this might relate to a puzzle cache that includes parking coords. Rather then solve the puzzle, just go looking all through the park trying to find a geocache. Or maybe a multicache or puzzle where there are only a few possible solutions, so you check them all rather then work out the puzzle. Lastly I might think of a locked cache where you pick the lock rather then solve the puzzle that gives the combination for the lock.

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and just begin ripping apart ground zero until I find the hiding spot
I agree with the other posts, ripping through everything until it's found. 

 

I could be taking that wrong, but that doesn't sound like responsible geocaching to me. It sounds like a few people doing caches like that could give us all a bad name and get caching banned in more places. :(

Actually, that is what I meant. I would not literally rip the area apart. I would use the term brute force as applying to inspecting every possible hiding spot within 100 feet of the coordinates.

 

A perfect example of my "brute force" technique involved Avroair's MI6 series. He refrenced some numbers off of telephone poles. In identifying the correct pole, my calculated coordinates put me in the middle of a residential neighborhood about .5 miles away. Knowing what I was looking for, I just started taking a complete inventory on every pole until I found the number that worked.

 

Leave only foot prints, take only pictures.... or travel bugs.

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Definition of "brute force" in computing

 

In geocaching terms, I tend to think of "brute force" as searching for a cache without using any cleverness. Often there is a visual cue, e.g. pile of sticks or different-colored rock, that will tip you off as to the location of the cache. Or you may have found other caches by the same hider and know that cache hider's preferred hiding methods. Or there may be only a small number of hiding spots that will work because of the size or shape of the container. If none of that applies, then you just have to comb the entire area for the cache and that is a brute force search.

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In my logs I refer to 'brute-force' in two ways:

 

1. first getting to the cache, meaning bush-whacking physically rather than using a trail

 

2. at a cache site - physical search of every known spot rather than clever use of head

 

If people have left a cache in an area which can be destroyed (which they often do), brute-force can be seen as trampling the area to look for the cache. Often after the obvious spots.

 

I use brute force only as a last ditch effort and the wife is nagging me or I am 1 hour overdue for dinner... :( Then she uses brute force on me.

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