And the name of the baby is…

This is sort of a departure from my normal double-crostic. I thought I would go for something a little more… mathematical. Actually, this puzzle has existed in my head for several years, and it’s a sort of imitation of a puzzle from GAMES Magazine I did as a kid with my family a long time ago.

As with all the puzzles I create, they are designed to be open-book, open-internet, open-collaboration, etc. I may even be willing to offer hints in the comments. The only thing I would ask is that you refrain from posting spoilers in the comments or anywhere else online.

I realize that many of our readers are not up to this, and that’s fine. But for the few die-hard puzzlers out there who enjoy a bit of number crunching… game on!

02/26/2012 10am EST UPDATE: please redownload… a couple formulas changed! Sorry!
02/26/2012 2:48pm EST UPDATE: oops… mixed up my X and Y correction terms. Re-download…
02/26/2012 4:30pm EST UPDATE: resolved some ambiguity about F definition.

02/26/2012 8:30pm EST:
No update to the puzzle. Since a few of you may be close to the end of the puzzle, let me clarify a few things. Your starting location is the location the picture is taken from, not the object in the picture. When you find the picture in Google Maps, you can click on “comments” to get the precise location. And precision matters. If you have a few answers wrong, you could easily end up in a different continent, but if you have a few fractions of a second wrong on the GPS coordinates, you’re still not going to land on the solution. When you land on the solution, I expect you’ll know it. 🙂 And you can probably do the distance to GPS translation on a number of websites, but I found this one to be especially helpful. That’s all the hints for now. More may follow. No known puzzle solvers, yet.

02/26/2012 10:40pm EST: hopefully final update. Added & clarified constraints in the Monopoly simulation.

02/27/2012 6:50pm EST: There should be no need for future versions of the puzzle; at least one person has solved it in its present form. Some questions were easier than I intended, while others might have been more tedious than I intended. Let me offer the following hints/thoughts concerning the “game” of Monopoly. If you think about it, it isn’t that different from the Game of Life in question F. Under the constraints of the question, both players will roll the same thing every turn, be forced to buy certain properties without auctions, and forbidden to trade. Unlike the Game of Life, which is perfectly deterministic, the Monopoly game has a range of possible outcomes based on a small set of things that you as the puzzler have to decide. You’re looking for outcome which maximizes the value of H. And it wouldn’t hurt to make sure you know all the rules of Monopoly.

2/27/2012 9:20pm EST: Ugh. What are best friends for? Killing my monopoly score, that’s what. Here’s one more revision: