Game Theory - Can You Solve Portal's IMPOSSIBLE Puzzle? (Portal)

Episode Date: April 23, 2023

What if I told you that there is a puzzle in Portal that NO ONE has been able to solve? It's true. I'm talking about the pole puzzle. If you used Portal's endless fall mechanic and put a pole inside - what happens? This had boggled the minds of Reddit users and fans alike. Today, Loyal Theorists, I aim to solve that so-called "impossible" puzzle that not even GLaDOS could solve!

Oh, I've always wanted one of these. Let's see, this button makes an orange portal entrance. This one makes a blue portal entrance. Let's try it out. Oh, this is gonna be fun. It works just like in the game. This is gonna be so cool. Ah, ah, ah, ah, I really should have thought this through. Hello, internet. Welcome to Game Theory. The show that's been thinking with Portals. since 2013. Seriously, unlike me across my 10 years of YouTube, the game portal doesn't feel like it's aged all that much. It's timeless, really. The basic concept is just so simple. You take a portal gun, you shoot it at one surface to create a blue portal hole,

you shoot it at another surface to create an orange portal hole, boom! Suddenly they're connected. Step through either of those holes that you've created to pass through to the other side. And yet, for as intuitive and easy to grasp as the concept is, it's the puzzles that they don't show you. That really start to wrinkle your brain. Like, what would happen if, for instance, For instance, I took my portal gun, shot a portal here on the ceiling, here on the floor.

Easy. You do this a hundred times throughout the actual game, but here's where things start to get interesting. Say I take a pole the exact height of this room, and I stick the bottom part of the pole down through here in the portal on the floor, where, wouldn't you know, it pops out up here through the portal on the ceiling, just like you would expect. Also, just long enough to reach that very pole's top half. And then, just because I like scientific chaos, let's just say I solder those two ends together. What I have done is solder the bottom half of a rigid pole to the top half of that exact same pole. What did I just do? Did I just create an infinite pole? Because remember, this is still one solid, unbendable pole.

I didn't cut it or anything, and yet through the power of portals, I've managed to stick the bottom end and the top end together. You just wrinkle my brain, man. What if I drop that infinite pole? Will it fall? Will it hold itself up in the air? Because remember, it's just resting. on itself infinitely. Let's make it even more complicated. What if the ceiling comes loose and my orange portal starts coming down, swallowing up more and more of my perfectly sized pole? That should mean

that more pole is coming out the blue portal at the bottom of the floor, but it can't really, can it? What if suddenly I choose to change the location of my orange portal to say like over here on the wall? Will my infinite pole just shoot out infinitely into space from both my blue and orange portals? There's a lot of questions here. Even if you've never played the games, These questions inherently make sense. What does happen when one solid, unbending object is split in two via portals, but is fused back together into one continuous object? That's probably a big reason why a meme asking these three exact questions wound up being on the front page of Reddit a few days ago.

Normally, when I spot stuff like this on Reddit, I try to give credit to the original poster, but here it's pretty hard. It came to my attention when it hit the front page of Reddit in June of 2020, but it's been circulating around the internet since at least 2013, endlessly reposted 9Gag, Reddit, BuzzFeed, Imger, and countless other meme sites. The earliest appearance of it I could find was in March of 2013 on an image hosting site called Image Donkey, where it was posted to a thread titled Funny Sneeze Pick, not mine. Strange.

But regardless of who originally asked it, today, I'm gonna be the one to finally answer it. Today, we're gonna be answering the three questions of this image, as well as coming to a pretty shocking conclusion about what would happen if you actually tried to do any of this in real life. Or at least a real life in which portals existed and function based, basically like you see them in the game. So let's start with question number one. What the heck does happen when you connect two ends of a pole together and let it drop? Will it support its own weight and stay still? Will it accelerate downward? Will it move at a constant speed? The answer here might seem obvious, but the why of it isn't quite so obvious. So let's get a little bit in depth, shall we? The hypothesis that the pole might stay still is based on the idea that what causes objects to fall downward is having air underneath them. You might assume that, hey, there's no air below this pole for it to fall into. Therefore, it's can't fall, so it should stay still, but that's not true. Falling is the result of gravity, and gravity is always affecting every object, even objects that aren't falling. For instance, right now you're probably watching this video while sitting in a chair. Your body is still being affected by gravity, but your body stays still because the chair you're sitting in is exerting an upward force that's equal to your weight. When your butt pushes down on the chair, the chair pushes up on you. And the chair stays stationary because the floor is exerting an upward force on it.

The long and short of all of this is that no object can support its own weight. And right now, when you drop the pole, there's nothing delivering an upward force under it. The pole falls down through the floor portal and back out the ceiling portal. Just like you're forced to do with many objects in the game, the unified pole will accelerate downward, falling continuously faster and faster and faster and faster until... Well, you've probably heard the concept terminal velocity before. The maximum speed of an object in free fall. For instance, when a human skydiver jumps out of an airplane,

their body will start accelerating downward, falling faster, faster until finally hitting a speed of about 125 miles an hour, 200 kilometers an hour. At which point their speed will remain relatively constant because of air resistance. The faster you fall, the more air you displace every second, and the more air you displace, the more air resistance will be acting on you to slow your fall. Eventually, they're displacing so much air that the air resistance pushing them upward will be equal to the gravitational force pulling them downward, causing that skydiver to stop speeding up, at which point their speed remains constant, and that is terminal velocity.

What's really interesting about this portal example, though, is that the pole isn't affected by air resistance the same way a normal object would be, because it doesn't have a bottom anymore. We soldered that away. There is no air below that pole to slow its fall. So does this just mean that the pole is accelerating infinitely? Not exactly. The air affects falling objects not just by blocking their descent from the bottom,

but also by providing friction. The pole, as it falls, is constantly rubbing against all the invisible air particles around it, which do exert a slight, very slight drag force. So the pole will eventually hit a terminal velocity, but it is gonna be really, really high. In fact, it's nearly impossible to calculate because the part of drag that we would be relying on is so minuscule that it's usually brushed off as a rounding error. But to answer the general question of what happens when you drop the pole, it's gonna fall and accelerate to an extremely high speed. The end result of which is something that we'll talk about

at the end of the episode because it gets interesting in a hurry. Question B is actually the most complicated of the three, so we're gonna skip that one until we've answered question C. Question C is actually the simplest, if you understand what's going on here. First off, if we take our portal gun and shoot it to make an orange portal hole on another surface, it might seem like we're moving the orange portal, but that's not really what's happening. We're effectively destroying the previous orange portal hole,

severing the portal, and then putting a new orange hole somewhere else. And you can confirm this if you play around with the portal gun in the game. What we can't confirm by testing in game is what happens to the pole, because there are some things the game designers fudge to avoid player frustration, and this is actually one of them. In the game, if you or any other object are stuck in the middle of the portal when the portal's destroyed, the game will secretly nudge you out of the end of the portal that you're closest to. This was almost certainly done to avoid all kinds of frustrating deaths,

as well as avoiding the problem of having to render a cube that's effectively been sliced in half, thus revealing the dead body that's been hidden inside your companion cube the entire time. But anyway, by moving the portal, you're effectively cutting the metal rod at the point where the portal ends. But wait, I hear you saying, doesn't the rod extend infinitely in both directions? If you look through either of the portal mouths, you'd see an infinite rod. And while that might seem true, let's be clear, the fact that you see the rod extending towards infinity doesn't mean that it's an infinite rod. You're just seeing it from infinite perspectives.

You just wrinkle my brain, man. Twice in the same video, awesome. But let me explain what's going on. Think about what happens when you hold up two mirrors across from each other. You see yourself stretching out to infinity. Now, does this mean that there are suddenly infinite copies of you? No, of course not. There's still only one you, but this trick allows us to see ourselves from infinite perspectives. It's the same thing here with the portals.

When we look through the portal, we see an infinite pole, but it's not. It's the same length pole that we started with. We haven't created mass out of nothing. The perspective just makes it look like it stretches into infinity. If we destroy one portal and then move it to another wall, it'll just cut the pole. Which leads us to our third, final and hardest question of the final. of them all. Question B. First of all, it's a question so complicated that even the game designers didn't want to deal with it. In the game, there are no puzzles that involve

portals moving to swallow objects. Yeah, I actually had to double check this one for myself, since it seems like it'd be such an obvious puzzle to do, portals on moving surfaces eating more of an object, but nope, not there, not once in the game. In fact, the game's engine isn't even equipped to deal with this sort of thing. If you create a custom map with moving portals, if you try to put yourself through it, things start to get really buggy. Either the game acts as though the portal is a solid surface that you can't pass through, or if you try to move through it, you just get stuck in the platform that you're standing on. The game's engine is designed for moving objects going through stationary portals,

not moving portals to come through and swallow stationary objects. What makes this interesting is that in physics terms, there's really no difference between a moving object through a stationary portal or a moving portal through a stationary object. Relativity tells us that a portal moving down on a rod at a rate of 10 meters per second is exactly the same as that rod moving up at a rate of 10 meters per second into the portal. It's pretty easy. Where things get complicated is that the speed that the orange ceiling portal moves

has to be the same as the speed that the blue floor portal moves. If they didn't, then that would be the equivalent of the rod simultaneously falling at two different speeds. Of course, this is a thing that can happen. An obvious example of this would be if your body is moving downward at a rate of 10 meters a second and your head is moving downward at a rate of 9 meters a second. That would mean that your head is being separated from your body at a rate of one meter per second. Or the opposite of decapitation, compression. If your feet are moving down at 10 meters a second, but your head is moving down at 11 meters a second,

then your head is getting squished downward into your feet at a rate of 1 meter a second until you've been flattened like a pancake. And you see, that's exactly what's happening to our rod in this example. If the orange portal moves downward, then that means the rod's head is moving downward at a rate faster than its feet are falling down through the blue portal, resulting in compression. Remember, the rod doesn't really have ends. Space time curving around with the portals has made the straight bar into the equivalent of a ring. Bringing the portals together at different speeds means that the metal has less space to occupy. It's effectively the equivalent of a hydraulic press video except instead of large machinery doing the compression, it's theoretical space-time events. And with that, my friends, we've completed our homework,

answering questions A, B, and C, but these three questions don't actually examine the most interesting implications of what's really going on here. As we established back in question A, any object thrown into a portal, rod or otherwise, will fall continuously until it reaches terminal velocity. It seems like this should be a formula for perpetual motion. If you found a way to harness that, for example, by dumping water through the portal and having it turn a water wheel, you could utilize what would effectively be an infinite source of energy, right? Wrong! In fact, what we've really done in all of these scenarios is Doom the Planet. That's not even an exaggeration.

See, assuming that these portals work using the same physics as a wormhole, which is a phenomenon studied by real physicists, and there's a little bit of conservation of energy going on behind the scenes. If we drop a 10-kilogram ball through the floor portal, and then it appears on the ceiling, it looks like we've just moved 10 kilograms upward for free. We got infinite energy, but really, that's not the case. The ends of the wormhole actually have mass.

When the 10-kilogram ball vanishes through a wormhole's mouth on the floor, the wormhole mouth actually gains mass to kind of the end up. compensate for that 10 kilograms that just banished. And when the 10 kilogram ball appears on the ceiling, the wormhole mouth at the ceiling loses an equivalent amount of mass. How's all this possible? Well, this is where wormhole physics get really freaky. The wormhole mouths can actually have negative mass, which is a whole separate can of worm holes to open up. All of this is to say that you can't move mass for free. Anytime an object vanishes through one end of the wormhole and appears on the other, the wormhole mouths gain or lose an equivalent amount of mass. So if you drop a ball or rod or heck, even your

through that portal and try to fall infinitely. Each time you pass through the portal, you're adding mass to the bottom wormhole mouth and subtracting it from the top. The wormhole mouth on the floor steadily becomes more and more massive, gaining more and more mass each time you pass through until eventually you have so much mass packed into such a tight space that it becomes a black hole,

at which point you, your loved ones and the entire planet and everything on it get crushed by the force of gravity until all that remains is a sphere 9 millimeters in diameter. So the moral of today, story, friends. Before you do the classic trick of creating a portal that connects the ceiling and the floor and tossing a cube in to see it accelerate downwards, don't let it fall for too long, or your fun with portals may just kill us all. But hey, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!