Assumptions: (1) I need to do something that at least slightly decreases the chance that these “evil forces” get hold of the pen in the next 50 years, compared with some baseline that may or may not be consistent from one idea to the next. (2) I need to keep it reasonably likely that in 50 years’ time I can still get hold of the pen so I can sell it to Einstein. (3) What I do needs to be at least in some sense possible in 1855, so e.g. “put it on a rocket in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun that will make it crash into the earth in 50 years’ time” is no good because there are no such rockets yet. Maybe I can get fairies to hide it because fairies were “known” about in 1855, but I can’t pull any time-dilation tricks using black holes because no one knew about black holes or time dilation in 1855. (4) I do actually have to be hiding the pen, in some sense; bribing the forces of evil to do a different kind of evil, or saying “screw it, there’s no such thing as magic, so I don’t care whether this pen is lost” won’t do. (5) The forces of evil have some idea that I have the thing and what is special about it, but probably don’t know too exactly what it looks like or have the ability to spy on me at all times or read my mind. -- All of this does restrict the options somewhat, so there will be some cases of Variations On A Theme below.
Remark: I’m having trouble figuring out any concrete set of assumptions about the forces of evil that doesn’t rather break the puzzle. If they know who I am, they can find me and torture me or something of the sort, and although torture notoriously doesn’t work very well they’ve got at least a good chance of figuring out where the pen is—unless I have e.g. delegated the task of hiding it to someone else, which is a reasonable thing to do but doesn’t really have 50 meaningfully different variants. And if for some reason they can’t do that, then instead the problem is too easy; it doesn’t seem as if I need to do anything at all. I hope the list below is at something like the intended level of paranoia.
Remark: If it means anything to say that the pen rather than Einstein is magical, perhaps I should forget about hiding it and start using it to write physics papers myself, and see what happens. (Hmm… Am I by any chance James Clerk Maxwell? The timing kinda checks out.)
Put it in a nondescript box somewhere.
Disguise it as something else. A magic wand, a stick, etc.
Build it into an item of furniture: the leg of a table, perhaps.
Bury it.
Just use it as a pen. The forces of evil will never expect that something I’m treating so mundane a way could be so magical.
Disguise it as, or hide it inside, something else, and then give that to someone else to hide, giving them an entirely false story about what it is and why it needs to be hidden.
Make a replica having (so far as I know) no magical powers whatever, and conspicuously hide the replica in some manner that the forces of evil can defeat but not without substantial effort. Hope that they do so and then think they’ve won. If so, it doesn’t much matter what I do with the real magic pen.
Make many, many replicas. In this case I’m not trying to fool the forces of evil, merely to DDOS them. Of course I will need some way to identify the real one; maybe I give them all serial numbers and I remember which number goes with the magic pen.
Make many replicas. Make no attempt to know which is the right one (so e.g. the forces of evil can’t discover which is which by torturing me). Then, fifty years from now, sell them all to Einstein. According to the problem specification, the inexorable Laws of Magic then guarantee that, since I’ve sold him the magic pen, he will use that one to write his papers.
Do nothing. Apparently some infallible magical oracle has told me that I will sell Einstein this pen in 50 years and he’ll use it to write papers about his relatives, or something. If so, the forces of evil can’t get hold of it in any way that stops that happening.
Use whatever powers of clairvoyance enabled me to know that I’ll sell the pen to Einstein, etc., to determine where the forces of evil will look. Put the pen somewhere else.
If the magic has the property that I can afford to lose part of the pen and replace it: take the pen apart and hide the parts; every now and then, collect together the hidden parts (aside from whatever bits the forces of evil have got hold of) and put them together with suitable replacement parts to make a whole pen, so I again have a single magic pen; then repeat. This way the forces of evil need to steal more than one pen’s worth of parts in order to win.
Make sure that wherever I go, I carry a strong metal box, about 20cm long and 5cm across, and that I frequently check that it hasn’t been lost. The forces of evil will assume that this contains the pen. Eventually they will no doubt steal it from me. Of course the pen is actually somewhere else entirely, and the forces of evil have wasted a lot of time and effort. (This needs to be combined with other techniques.)
Deposit it discreetly with a Swiss bank. This will both keep the pen safe and have it conveniently positioned for sale to Einstein in Zurich.
Sew it into the hem (or some similar bit) of an article of clothing I wear. Transfer it from one to another often enough that I don’t arouse suspicion by wearing the same thing all the time. This way the pen is always on my person and hence harder to steal.
Shove it in a desk drawer along with all my other pens, making no effort to remember which one it is. As with #5 above, this should avoid suspicion. As with #9 above, sell the entire contents of the drawer to Einstein in 50 years’ time.
Place it in a hollowed-out book, among thousands on my shelves. (I do in fact have thousands of books. That was probably much harder in 1855 than it is now, so maybe it’s only hundreds; that could still be sufficient.)
I think 1855 is late enough that I might plausibly have plumbing in my house of roughly the kind we have today. Fit some extra pipes, made to look as if they carry water or, better, sewage, but in fact don’t, and hide the pen inside one of those.
Hide it within a wall of my house. It had better be one I was intending to repaint anyway, to hide the newly replaced mortar or drilled-out brick or whatever.
Acquire the habit of collecting musical instruments. Place the pen inside the tubing of a brass or woodwind instrument that I don’t know how to play.
Become a keen hunter. Place the pen inside one barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun. (Because then, with a bit of care, perhaps I can still shoot with it, making it less prominent as That Gun I Never Actually Use.)
If I have a few years before the forces of evil catch up with me: drill out a bit of a growing tree trunk and put the pen in there; the tree will continue growing and engulf it, hopefully in a way that doesn’t make the history too obvious.
Persuade a surgeon to embed it in one of my thighbones. (I don’t know whether this is actually possible. It again depends on not being observed by the forces of evil until I’ve had time to recover from this rather drastic procedure.)
Persuade a builder to incorporate it into a house newly built.
Obviously the magic bit must be the nib, right? That’s the only part that does the actual writing. Well, it seems like we could incorporate a pen nib easily enough into the insides of an old-style pocketwatch. Watch-making is therefore my new profession; build the nib somehow into the workings of a particularly elegant watch and sell it to someone I can rely upon to keep it for display rather than using it or selling it on. Fifty years later, buy it back. (Einstein, on discovering this way of securing magical physics-paper-writing pens: “If I had known, I would have become a watchmaker.”)
It seems that in many of these schemes the weakest link is me. So let’s hide me and hopefully the pen with me. Fake suicide or accidental death and start a new life with a new name, taking nothing but the clothes I’m wearing … and this pen I happen to be carrying.
Travel abroad, moving on from each location to another as quickly as possible. Back in 1855 I don’t think it was so easy to follow someone through a lengthy sequence of such moves. Change name from time to time if possible. End up somewhere out of the way.
Implant it in a giant tortoise. (Might be tricky. Might be bad for the tortoise and make it not long-lived enough. Might not be possible to avoid visible marks.)
Apparently we are in a world with miraculous physics-inspiring pens and clairvoyance. Perhaps we have invisibility spells too: make the pen invisible.
Or perhaps instead there are spells of the “notice me not” type. That would do, too.
Or spells for teleporting objects around, in which case perhaps I can get the pen into (say) the inside of a cave a mile underground, without any risk of being seen going there. Of course this is only any use if I can get it back again later.
Or spells for turning things into other things, either in reality or in appearance. Perhaps instead of implanting the pen into a giant tortoise I can make it be a giant tortoise, for instance.
Or, combining this with the idea of hiding myself, make the start-a-new-life approach work much better by magically altering my appearance completely.
Or, addressing the I-am-the-weakest-link problem differently, magically suppress my memory of where I have hidden the pen for fifty years.
Persuade a sculptor to integrate the pen (invisibly) into a sculpture in stone, bronze or similar. This hides the pen in something solid and hard to get into, that probably isn’t going anywhere in a hurry, and whose owner is likely to keep it reasonably well protected. Of course I need to be able to buy it back 50 years from now, and artwork prices are inconveniently unpredictable.
Hide the pen part-way up my chimney. The forces of evil are unlikely to be working as chimney-sweeps, especially as so many of those in 1855 are children, and I can just leave my chimney uncleaned or get it cleaned only by individuals I know and trust.
Even better than building the pen into a house, build it under a house, which had better be mine, by incorporating it into the foundations. Very difficult to steal, but of course also very difficult to retrieve; I need not to mind the expense and inconvenience of demolishing the house later.
Incorporate it into the frame of a bicycle. Sorry, I mean a velocipede.
Persuade a condemned criminal, or terminally ill patient at the point of death, to eat it. It will be buried with them, and I can dig up the body later. (Swallowing something as large as a pen is difficult, but I think there are those who can do it. And it needs to be tough enough not to be wrecked by the stomach acid.)
The whole scenario is absurd enough that this is plainly inside a work of fiction. So hide the pen for 50 years inside a timeskip in the work of fiction, one of those bits where years of action are replaced with (say) a row of three asterisks on a page. Maybe the next lines are “But how on earth, said George, were you able to keep it safe for all that time? -- I really don’t know, replied Gareth, maybe I was just really lucky.”
Apparently I’m some sort of merchant, since I’m going to sell this thing to Einstein in 50 years. Let’s suppose I have an international trading business, much of which is made up of writing implements. Put this one in a batch of pens sent to a warehouse abroad. Make sure I move all my stock around from time to time, for camouflage. Keep it sailing around the world and take care that that batch is never actually sold.
I mentioned earlier that I was going to become a hunter. Ensure that some of the things I hunt, and keep the remains of around as exhibits, are birds—pheasants, peacocks and the like. And let’s say this is a quill pen. Incorporate it into the plumage of one of the birds stuffed and mounted on my wall.
Bribe someone at, say, the British Museum to place it inside a rarely-moved exhibit. Have them assassinated a little later just in case the forces of evil get to them. (Just as well I’m not evil, eh?) We’ll need a bit more bribery in fifty years’ time.
Earlier I proposed implanting the pen somehow into the body of a very long-lived animal. Instead, implant it somehow into the body of my beloved pet cat. It’s likely that this will impair the cat’s health and it will tragically die; if not, cats don’t live all that long even when their health is good. When it dies I will of course be heartbroken, bury the cat somewhere, perhaps in my garden, and visit the grave regularly. And fifty years later I will dig it up and retrieve the pen.
Sail to a remote island (preferably one of a large archipelago for the usual “chaff” reasons), and bury the pen there. Bring no other crew, or have ’em all killed if that’s impossible. (Again, it’s just as well it’s the other guys who are the forces of evil.) Remember, but do not write down, which island and where I buried it.
Simply pretend to have lost the pen. Maybe write an anguished newspaper article about how I had this extraordinary revelation about how this ordinary object might transform the world’s intellectual history, and then I stupidly left it with a servant who threw it away, or something of the sort. With a bit of luck, the forces of evil will believe the story and stop searching. (The pen itself is sitting in a drawer or something.)
Seek out the forces of evil, and once I locate at least one of their number arrange to meet them and pretend to be naive and admiring and to think that in him or her I have found a true friend. Drop hints from time to time that I have a very important object that I need to find a safe place for. Eventually, explain that it’s a pen with a mysterious destiny, that it’s essential it remain safe for 50 years, that I am terrified that Someone is trying to get hold of it and disrupt that destiny, and please, you’re the best and most trustworthy person I know, could I possibly impose on you by giving it to you and begging you to keep it safe for me? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. … Of course what I give them is a fake. Again, the goal is to stop them bothering to search for the real pen, which is sitting in my desk.
Maintain a large pile of rotting manure in my garden, keeping it well supplied at all times. Good for the soil, you know. Somewhere in its depths there is a very well sealed box containing the pen. I should have enough skill with a shovel to avoid accidentally planting the pen.
(This one requires quite a lot of money.) Hire several teams of mercenaries to guard sealed boxes for me in various out-of-the-way places. Visit each every few months to keep up morale. One of the boxes does contain the pen. The others contain a deadly poison which will hopefully kill any of the forces of evil who are foolish enough to storm one of my outposts and retrieve the box. Given enough such outposts, it is much more likely that they give up after a couple of tragic deaths than that they find the actual pen.
Write down a lengthy list of increasingly ridiculous ways to try to hide such an object, and publish it somewhere where the forces of evil will easily be able to see it. Then do something else. (For obvious reasons I shall not say what.)
Many beautiful ones! I particularly liked #6 and #21, among others.
Also, I have some intuition there might be more torture-resistant solutions than you suggest, like #9, but actually without magic.
Though, overall, it could be nice to try a week with a challenge that’s engineered to be well-balanced. I’ve found getting to 50 challenging enough to be fun regardless of the fact that all challenges thus far having had breaking flaws or impossibilities. But it’s certainly less elegant than a more constrained puzzle that also enforces the constraints.
Assumptions: (1) I need to do something that at least slightly decreases the chance that these “evil forces” get hold of the pen in the next 50 years, compared with some baseline that may or may not be consistent from one idea to the next. (2) I need to keep it reasonably likely that in 50 years’ time I can still get hold of the pen so I can sell it to Einstein. (3) What I do needs to be at least in some sense possible in 1855, so e.g. “put it on a rocket in a highly eccentric orbit around the sun that will make it crash into the earth in 50 years’ time” is no good because there are no such rockets yet. Maybe I can get fairies to hide it because fairies were “known” about in 1855, but I can’t pull any time-dilation tricks using black holes because no one knew about black holes or time dilation in 1855. (4) I do actually have to be hiding the pen, in some sense; bribing the forces of evil to do a different kind of evil, or saying “screw it, there’s no such thing as magic, so I don’t care whether this pen is lost” won’t do. (5) The forces of evil have some idea that I have the thing and what is special about it, but probably don’t know too exactly what it looks like or have the ability to spy on me at all times or read my mind. -- All of this does restrict the options somewhat, so there will be some cases of Variations On A Theme below.
Remark: I’m having trouble figuring out any concrete set of assumptions about the forces of evil that doesn’t rather break the puzzle. If they know who I am, they can find me and torture me or something of the sort, and although torture notoriously doesn’t work very well they’ve got at least a good chance of figuring out where the pen is—unless I have e.g. delegated the task of hiding it to someone else, which is a reasonable thing to do but doesn’t really have 50 meaningfully different variants. And if for some reason they can’t do that, then instead the problem is too easy; it doesn’t seem as if I need to do anything at all. I hope the list below is at something like the intended level of paranoia.
Remark: If it means anything to say that the pen rather than Einstein is magical, perhaps I should forget about hiding it and start using it to write physics papers myself, and see what happens. (Hmm… Am I by any chance James Clerk Maxwell? The timing kinda checks out.)
Put it in a nondescript box somewhere.
Disguise it as something else. A magic wand, a stick, etc.
Build it into an item of furniture: the leg of a table, perhaps.
Bury it.
Just use it as a pen. The forces of evil will never expect that something I’m treating so mundane a way could be so magical.
Disguise it as, or hide it inside, something else, and then give that to someone else to hide, giving them an entirely false story about what it is and why it needs to be hidden.
Make a replica having (so far as I know) no magical powers whatever, and conspicuously hide the replica in some manner that the forces of evil can defeat but not without substantial effort. Hope that they do so and then think they’ve won. If so, it doesn’t much matter what I do with the real magic pen.
Make many, many replicas. In this case I’m not trying to fool the forces of evil, merely to DDOS them. Of course I will need some way to identify the real one; maybe I give them all serial numbers and I remember which number goes with the magic pen.
Make many replicas. Make no attempt to know which is the right one (so e.g. the forces of evil can’t discover which is which by torturing me). Then, fifty years from now, sell them all to Einstein. According to the problem specification, the inexorable Laws of Magic then guarantee that, since I’ve sold him the magic pen, he will use that one to write his papers.
Do nothing. Apparently some infallible magical oracle has told me that I will sell Einstein this pen in 50 years and he’ll use it to write papers about his relatives, or something. If so, the forces of evil can’t get hold of it in any way that stops that happening.
Use whatever powers of clairvoyance enabled me to know that I’ll sell the pen to Einstein, etc., to determine where the forces of evil will look. Put the pen somewhere else.
If the magic has the property that I can afford to lose part of the pen and replace it: take the pen apart and hide the parts; every now and then, collect together the hidden parts (aside from whatever bits the forces of evil have got hold of) and put them together with suitable replacement parts to make a whole pen, so I again have a single magic pen; then repeat. This way the forces of evil need to steal more than one pen’s worth of parts in order to win.
Make sure that wherever I go, I carry a strong metal box, about 20cm long and 5cm across, and that I frequently check that it hasn’t been lost. The forces of evil will assume that this contains the pen. Eventually they will no doubt steal it from me. Of course the pen is actually somewhere else entirely, and the forces of evil have wasted a lot of time and effort. (This needs to be combined with other techniques.)
Deposit it discreetly with a Swiss bank. This will both keep the pen safe and have it conveniently positioned for sale to Einstein in Zurich.
Sew it into the hem (or some similar bit) of an article of clothing I wear. Transfer it from one to another often enough that I don’t arouse suspicion by wearing the same thing all the time. This way the pen is always on my person and hence harder to steal.
Shove it in a desk drawer along with all my other pens, making no effort to remember which one it is. As with #5 above, this should avoid suspicion. As with #9 above, sell the entire contents of the drawer to Einstein in 50 years’ time.
Place it in a hollowed-out book, among thousands on my shelves. (I do in fact have thousands of books. That was probably much harder in 1855 than it is now, so maybe it’s only hundreds; that could still be sufficient.)
I think 1855 is late enough that I might plausibly have plumbing in my house of roughly the kind we have today. Fit some extra pipes, made to look as if they carry water or, better, sewage, but in fact don’t, and hide the pen inside one of those.
Hide it within a wall of my house. It had better be one I was intending to repaint anyway, to hide the newly replaced mortar or drilled-out brick or whatever.
Acquire the habit of collecting musical instruments. Place the pen inside the tubing of a brass or woodwind instrument that I don’t know how to play.
Become a keen hunter. Place the pen inside one barrel of a double-barrelled shotgun. (Because then, with a bit of care, perhaps I can still shoot with it, making it less prominent as That Gun I Never Actually Use.)
If I have a few years before the forces of evil catch up with me: drill out a bit of a growing tree trunk and put the pen in there; the tree will continue growing and engulf it, hopefully in a way that doesn’t make the history too obvious.
Persuade a surgeon to embed it in one of my thighbones. (I don’t know whether this is actually possible. It again depends on not being observed by the forces of evil until I’ve had time to recover from this rather drastic procedure.)
Persuade a builder to incorporate it into a house newly built.
Obviously the magic bit must be the nib, right? That’s the only part that does the actual writing. Well, it seems like we could incorporate a pen nib easily enough into the insides of an old-style pocketwatch. Watch-making is therefore my new profession; build the nib somehow into the workings of a particularly elegant watch and sell it to someone I can rely upon to keep it for display rather than using it or selling it on. Fifty years later, buy it back. (Einstein, on discovering this way of securing magical physics-paper-writing pens: “If I had known, I would have become a watchmaker.”)
It seems that in many of these schemes the weakest link is me. So let’s hide me and hopefully the pen with me. Fake suicide or accidental death and start a new life with a new name, taking nothing but the clothes I’m wearing … and this pen I happen to be carrying.
Travel abroad, moving on from each location to another as quickly as possible. Back in 1855 I don’t think it was so easy to follow someone through a lengthy sequence of such moves. Change name from time to time if possible. End up somewhere out of the way.
Implant it in a giant tortoise. (Might be tricky. Might be bad for the tortoise and make it not long-lived enough. Might not be possible to avoid visible marks.)
Apparently we are in a world with miraculous physics-inspiring pens and clairvoyance. Perhaps we have invisibility spells too: make the pen invisible.
Or perhaps instead there are spells of the “notice me not” type. That would do, too.
Or spells for teleporting objects around, in which case perhaps I can get the pen into (say) the inside of a cave a mile underground, without any risk of being seen going there. Of course this is only any use if I can get it back again later.
Or spells for turning things into other things, either in reality or in appearance. Perhaps instead of implanting the pen into a giant tortoise I can make it be a giant tortoise, for instance.
Or, combining this with the idea of hiding myself, make the start-a-new-life approach work much better by magically altering my appearance completely.
Or, addressing the I-am-the-weakest-link problem differently, magically suppress my memory of where I have hidden the pen for fifty years.
Persuade a sculptor to integrate the pen (invisibly) into a sculpture in stone, bronze or similar. This hides the pen in something solid and hard to get into, that probably isn’t going anywhere in a hurry, and whose owner is likely to keep it reasonably well protected. Of course I need to be able to buy it back 50 years from now, and artwork prices are inconveniently unpredictable.
Hide the pen part-way up my chimney. The forces of evil are unlikely to be working as chimney-sweeps, especially as so many of those in 1855 are children, and I can just leave my chimney uncleaned or get it cleaned only by individuals I know and trust.
Even better than building the pen into a house, build it under a house, which had better be mine, by incorporating it into the foundations. Very difficult to steal, but of course also very difficult to retrieve; I need not to mind the expense and inconvenience of demolishing the house later.
Incorporate it into the frame of a bicycle. Sorry, I mean a velocipede.
Persuade a condemned criminal, or terminally ill patient at the point of death, to eat it. It will be buried with them, and I can dig up the body later. (Swallowing something as large as a pen is difficult, but I think there are those who can do it. And it needs to be tough enough not to be wrecked by the stomach acid.)
The whole scenario is absurd enough that this is plainly inside a work of fiction. So hide the pen for 50 years inside a timeskip in the work of fiction, one of those bits where years of action are replaced with (say) a row of three asterisks on a page. Maybe the next lines are “But how on earth, said George, were you able to keep it safe for all that time? -- I really don’t know, replied Gareth, maybe I was just really lucky.”
Apparently I’m some sort of merchant, since I’m going to sell this thing to Einstein in 50 years. Let’s suppose I have an international trading business, much of which is made up of writing implements. Put this one in a batch of pens sent to a warehouse abroad. Make sure I move all my stock around from time to time, for camouflage. Keep it sailing around the world and take care that that batch is never actually sold.
I mentioned earlier that I was going to become a hunter. Ensure that some of the things I hunt, and keep the remains of around as exhibits, are birds—pheasants, peacocks and the like. And let’s say this is a quill pen. Incorporate it into the plumage of one of the birds stuffed and mounted on my wall.
Bribe someone at, say, the British Museum to place it inside a rarely-moved exhibit. Have them assassinated a little later just in case the forces of evil get to them. (Just as well I’m not evil, eh?) We’ll need a bit more bribery in fifty years’ time.
Earlier I proposed implanting the pen somehow into the body of a very long-lived animal. Instead, implant it somehow into the body of my beloved pet cat. It’s likely that this will impair the cat’s health and it will tragically die; if not, cats don’t live all that long even when their health is good. When it dies I will of course be heartbroken, bury the cat somewhere, perhaps in my garden, and visit the grave regularly. And fifty years later I will dig it up and retrieve the pen.
Sail to a remote island (preferably one of a large archipelago for the usual “chaff” reasons), and bury the pen there. Bring no other crew, or have ’em all killed if that’s impossible. (Again, it’s just as well it’s the other guys who are the forces of evil.) Remember, but do not write down, which island and where I buried it.
Simply pretend to have lost the pen. Maybe write an anguished newspaper article about how I had this extraordinary revelation about how this ordinary object might transform the world’s intellectual history, and then I stupidly left it with a servant who threw it away, or something of the sort. With a bit of luck, the forces of evil will believe the story and stop searching. (The pen itself is sitting in a drawer or something.)
Seek out the forces of evil, and once I locate at least one of their number arrange to meet them and pretend to be naive and admiring and to think that in him or her I have found a true friend. Drop hints from time to time that I have a very important object that I need to find a safe place for. Eventually, explain that it’s a pen with a mysterious destiny, that it’s essential it remain safe for 50 years, that I am terrified that Someone is trying to get hold of it and disrupt that destiny, and please, you’re the best and most trustworthy person I know, could I possibly impose on you by giving it to you and begging you to keep it safe for me? Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you. … Of course what I give them is a fake. Again, the goal is to stop them bothering to search for the real pen, which is sitting in my desk.
Maintain a large pile of rotting manure in my garden, keeping it well supplied at all times. Good for the soil, you know. Somewhere in its depths there is a very well sealed box containing the pen. I should have enough skill with a shovel to avoid accidentally planting the pen.
(This one requires quite a lot of money.) Hire several teams of mercenaries to guard sealed boxes for me in various out-of-the-way places. Visit each every few months to keep up morale. One of the boxes does contain the pen. The others contain a deadly poison which will hopefully kill any of the forces of evil who are foolish enough to storm one of my outposts and retrieve the box. Given enough such outposts, it is much more likely that they give up after a couple of tragic deaths than that they find the actual pen.
Write down a lengthy list of increasingly ridiculous ways to try to hide such an object, and publish it somewhere where the forces of evil will easily be able to see it. Then do something else. (For obvious reasons I shall not say what.)
Many beautiful ones! I particularly liked #6 and #21, among others.
Also, I have some intuition there might be more torture-resistant solutions than you suggest, like #9, but actually without magic.
Though, overall, it could be nice to try a week with a challenge that’s engineered to be well-balanced. I’ve found getting to 50 challenging enough to be fun regardless of the fact that all challenges thus far having had breaking flaws or impossibilities. But it’s certainly less elegant than a more constrained puzzle that also enforces the constraints.