Yep; those are a series of bets, where I substituted another group’s resources for mine. I couldn’t conceive of any way to make it impossible for them to succeed owing to the constraint that I need to deliver the pen to Einstein. The best I can do with information is make sure neither I nor the evil forces know where it is, but this prevents me from getting the pen back. Anything that exploits an information imbalance fails in the face of basic things like “evil already has you under surveillance—now they know too.”
The underspecification of the question is to give us degrees of freedom to play with, but the thing is that freedom is symmetric: who knows how many sinister soups into which the forces of evil have dipped their dastardly digits?
Yep; those are a series of bets, where I substituted another group’s resources for mine. I couldn’t conceive of any way to make it impossible for them to succeed owing to the constraint that I need to deliver the pen to Einstein. The best I can do with information is make sure neither I nor the evil forces know where it is, but this prevents me from getting the pen back. Anything that exploits an information imbalance fails in the face of basic things like “evil already has you under surveillance—now they know too.”
The underspecification of the question is to give us degrees of freedom to play with, but the thing is that freedom is symmetric: who knows how many sinister soups into which the forces of evil have dipped their dastardly digits?