Clue fans, here’s scientific proof that it was Colonel Mustard with a candlestick

When we last heard from Eve Armstrong one year ago today, she was a postdoc at the BioCircuits Institute at the University of California, San Diego, musing mathematically about what would have happened if she had asked one Barry Cottonfield to her high school prom in 1997. Today, she is a postdoc at the Computational Neuroscience Initiative at the University of Pennsylvania — where, it would appear from a new preprint, titled “Colonel Mustard in the Aviary with the Candlestick: a limit cycle attractor transitions to a stable focus via supercritical Andronov-Hopf bifurcation,” she has solved a brutal murder.

To be more precise:

We establish the means by which Mr. Boddy came to transition from a stable trajectory within the global phase space of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a stable point on the cement floor of an aviary near the west bank of the Schuylkill River.

The preprint will be posted at arXiv tomorrow, but Armstrong did not want to keep the world in suspense any longer, so we are hosting the manuscript here at Retraction Watch on a more appropriate day, April 1. She was also kind enough to answer a few questions about the work:

Retraction Watch (RW): We note that Mr. Boddy was found just this morning, April 1, but that you have already somehow been able to perform the study and write up a manuscript. Some might even call that…suspicious. Are you in fact a suspect in the murder?

Eve Armstrong (EA): I deny any suspicious connection to this murder.  I claim that I am just quick. Really quick. In this business, it’s quickness-or-sink.

RW: What is “Neurocanticumology?”

EA: Neurocanticumology is an endeavour to seek the neural basis of song generation.  You might not know it by this name, because usually it is called “the neural basis of song generation”.  But I felt that it deserves a lofty-sounding term of its own. So I stuck together two Latin words (because Latin is pretty much the loftiest you can get).  “Canticum” is Latin for song, and “neuro” is Latin for neuro.

RW: Have the police been receptive to your theory?

EA: The police.  Interesting. I hadn’t thought of contacting the police.  This may sound arrogant, but I just don’t envision the police knowing how to perform a time-delay embedding of a scalar time series data set.  I’m not saying your idea isn’t relevant – I’m saying that I personally just don’t see it.

RW: You write that “we” — the “we” once again undefined, with you as the only author — “note long-term plans to construct an underlying dynamical model capable of predicting the stability of equilibria in different parameter regimes, in the event that Mr. Boddy is ever murdered again.” We can pretend to understand the first half of that sentence, but we really don’t understand the second half. Unless Mr. Boddy is actually a zombie?

EA: Yes, good point, and I admit I don’t really understand it either.  On the other hand, statistics don’t lie. Clue was first presented to the public as Cluedo (in England) in 1949, and has since sold well.  I’ll do a low-ball estimate of 1,000 sales a year, and then assume that each buyer played the game at least once per year. And there have been 68 years since then.  That gives us: 1,000 x 1 x 68 = 68,000 murders of Mr. Boddy. If we presume that there is nothing particularly special about this latest instance in the aviary, then we can assume that Mr. Boddy will continue to be murdered at roughly the same rate.  Again, as you say, it seems counter-intuitive. I don’t pretend to understand it; I’m just going with the data. (About the “we”: my miniature schnauzer Gretel oversaw the post-mortem investigation of the aviary. She was too modest, however, to accept co-authorship.)

RW: You refer to “Cluedo,” and to “Clue,” where a Mr. Mustard and a candlestick appear, but no aviary. Are you sure this is not simply a flight of fancy?

EA: Could be.  Could be that the aviary is a front.  Actually, now that you mention it, this tunnel system linking the aviary to both the Wharton School of Business’ conservatory and the Graduate Student Lounge’s billiard room is a bit strange.  Still, I just keep going back to the aviary as the most likely breeding ground for potential murder suspects – because those birds just look so mean. Don’t they? (See Figure 3.) Really mean.

RW: You cite “Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Python Pictures. RCA/Columbia Pictures (1991).” But as everyone knows, that film was released in 1975. How can we be expected to trust the rest of your work?

EA: Oh no!  You’re right – that’s a mistake!  Thank you for catching that! I don’t know how that slipped by me.  Alas, you have made a strong case that possibly X other things have also slipped by me.  Hm, I am at a loss .. Well, as stated in the paper: by the time future murders happen, I hope to have developed a validated predictive model for such events, so that we don’t have to rely entirely on circumstance, conjectures, and movie references.

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