response 281 of 1578:

Jan 7 20:57 UTC 2003

flawy

Looking through a grep of "/usr/local/share/ispell/english.dict" on M-
Net, I don't see any words which I know and which are still 
possibilities.  I would never use "flawy" but I imagine I know what it 
means.

I gave up on the 6 and 7 letter contests because many of the words 
seemed to be stretches, with regard to fitting into English.  I don't 
get that much pleasure from searching through word lists to see if some 
weird string of characters is really a word.  One 7 letter winner 
was "zydecos", the next was "assumpt", and I realized the others 
playing weren't users of the same language I call English.  The last 6 
letter winner I saw was "biffin"... it seemed the word choices were 
designed to make sure no one would guess them.  Why not use random 
strings of characters, if obscurity is the purpose?  I hope that's not 
about to happen to this contest as well.

response 285 of 1578:

Jan 8 00:20 UTC 2003

flaxy

response 287 of 1578:

Jan 8 01:40 UTC 2003

Since this game is linked to the general conference as well as the
puzzle conference, I think playing a bit of a more accessible version of
the game is a good choice.  Using common words means that people who
play without doing word list searchs aren't at a serious disadvantage.

I think having different games going by different rules is a good choice
- lets people with different tastes choose their poison.

In this case, I deliberately chose a word not in /usr/dict/words, but
nevertheless quite common.  Good word lists are surprisingly hard to find.

response 289 of 1578:

Jan 8 02:34 UTC 2003

OK, I'm thinking of a 5-letter word.
----------
flaky  0  (lastword)

response 291 of 1578:

Jan 8 02:44 UTC 2003

Hmmm...Just found a pretty good source for word lists: 

     http://wordlist.sourceforge.net/

Some work is required to massage this into a useful form.

response 293 of 1578:

Jan 8 02:49 UTC 2003

trout

response 295 of 1578:

Jan 8 04:40 UTC 2003

mixer

response 297 of 1578:

Jan 8 05:14 UTC 2003

Cool.  Five letters to choose from. :)

response 299 of 1578:

Jan 8 06:37 UTC 2003

I've posted notes on how I do analysis a couple times, but it's improved
a bit since the last time.  At this point I have it worked out so it
would be pretty plausible to program (interesting too, since you'd
likely want to do some recursion), but I don't really intend to.  I do
it by scribbling over a couple square inches of scrap paper, but I'll be
more formal here.

We keep three main data structures:

  NEGATIVES:  For each of the 5 positions, a list of letters that we
     know cannot be there.
  POSSIBLES:  For each of the 5 positions, a list of letters that have
     been guessed for that position, not including those in NEGATIVES.
  PATTERNS:  A list of five-letter patterns that the word must fit one
      of.  These can have ? marks in them to indicate positions that
      can be filed by any letter not in NEGATIVES or POSSIBLES for that
      position.

Suppose we have this data so far:

crash 0
felts 0
swear 0
fleat 0
grain 1
eerie 2
grasp 1

First step is to handle all the zeros buy loading them into NEGATIVES.

NEGATIVES[1] cfs
         [2] rewl
         [3] ale
         [4] sta
         [5] hsrt

Now we pick one of the other words to work on.  The order doesn't effect
the final result, but some orders are easier to do than others.  We
won't worry about it and just do them in the order given, starting with
"grain 1".

First, we knock out letters from "grain" that appear in NEGATIVES.  This
leaves "g##in 1", that is one (and only one) of "g" "i" or "n" must
appear in the word.  These letters get added to POSSIBLES.  So the word
must be "g????" or "???i?" or "????n".  So we add these three
posibilities to PATTERNS.  So we now have:

POSSIBLES[1] g
         [2]
         [3]
         [4] i
         [5] n

PATTERNS
   g????
   ???i?
   ????n

Next word is "eerie 2".  Again, we knock out the negatives, giving
"e#rie 2".  We need to merge this into our list of patterns, one pattern
at a time.  Let's start with old pattern "???i?".  The "i" is already
there, so we need one other letter from "e#rie" to ensure that there are
two matches with it.  It has to be one of "e??i?" or "??ri?" or "???ie",
so those three will be in the new pattern list.

Next we do old pattern "g????".  We need to find all ways that that can
match two letters of "e#rie".  Well, obviously the initial "e" can't be
right in this case, because we already know the initial letter is "g". 
So you can have two of "rie".  But remember that in "g????" the ? can
not be any letter in either NEGATIVE or POSSIBLES.  In particular the
fourth position cannot be an "i", because "i" is listed among the
POSSIBLES for that column.  If we allowed an "i" here, "grain" would
have been a 2, not a 1, so we know it can't be an "i".  Thus, the only
way to merge "e#rie 2" into "g????" is "g?r?e".

Similarly the only way to merge "e#rie 2" into "????n" is "e?r?n".

If you wanted to do this more mechanically, you could draw a grid, like
this, with all possible pairs from "e#rie" across the top, and the old
patterns down the side.  Compare each pair to get the new PATTERN list.

        e?r??  e??i?  e???e  ??ri?  ??r?e  ???ie
      +-----------------------------------------
g???? |   -      -      -      -    g?r?e    -
???i? |   -    e??i?    -    ??ri?    -    ???ie
????n | e?r?n    -      -      -      -      -

It's obvious why you can't combine "e?r??" with "g????".  e!=g.  You
can't combine "e??i?" with "g????" because in the 4th position or
"g????" the ? cannot be an "i".  You can't combine "e?r??" with "???i?"
for almost the same reason.

Either way you do the analysis, the new result is

NEGATIVES (unchanged)

POSSIBLES[1] ge
         [2]
         [3] r
         [4] i
         [5] ne

PATTERNS
   g?r?e
   e??i?
   ??ri?
   ???ie
   e?r?n

Next word is "grasp 1".  Knocking out the negatives gives "g###p 1".  So
either the first letter must be a 'g' or the last must be a 'p'.  We can
merge that into the list of patterns easily enough.  Note that the
pattern "e?r?n" is incompatible with this, and so is dropped.  Note also
that ? in column 1 cannot be turned into 'g' because 'g' is on the
POSSIBLE list for column 1.

NEGATIVES[1] cfs
         [2] rewl
         [3] ale
         [4] sta
         [5] hsrt

POSSIBLES[1] ge
         [2]
         [3] r
         [4] i
         [5] nep

PATTERNS
   g?r?e
   e??ip
   ??rip

At this point, we are in pretty good shape to guess.  "gorse" doesn't
work (the 's' is a negative).  The second case could only be 'equip'. 
The word 'atrip' is possible for the last.  'adrip' seems like more of a
word, but m-w.com does not agree.  So 'equip' is a pretty solid guess at
this point.

This process wouldn't be too hard to implement.  The merge step is the
hardest, and that'd probably work cutely with a recursive algorithm.  Of
course the run time is exponential in the number of letters.  I'm
willing to bet that the problem is actually NP-complete (it just stinks
of satisfiability), so there is little hope of doing better.  But as
long is N is just 5, that needn't concern us.

Of course, if you have a good word list, a much simpler approach is just
to read through the word list, discarding any words that don't fit all
the results to date.  But that's no fun.

response 301 of 1578:

Jan 8 10:31 UTC 2003

re #290:  (yes, this item is linked to Games/Puzzle/IQ, where the 6-letter
          and 7-letter variants also can be found.  I'd considered *not*
          linking this one, but decided otherwise after I couldn't remember
          why it seemed like a good idea to not link it.)

          (Games/Puzzle/IQ really needs an interested FW.)

price

response 303 of 1578:

Jan 8 14:16 UTC 2003

vowel

response 305 of 1578:

Jan 8 16:40 UTC 2003

slice