A Solution for the Ten Letter Acrostic Puzzle? 258
rmo101 asks: "A story in the Times reports a solution to the ten letter acrostic square puzzle that has defied solution since the ancient Greeks. An acrostic puzzle comprises a square of letters where the arrangement of letters from words written in rows result in the same words appearing vertically in the same order. The ten letter solution, however, is not accepted by all as one of the words does not appear in a dictionary. Sounds like a puzzle in search of a fiendish algorithm for interrogating a dictionary. The ancient Greeks believed that the solver of the ten letter puzzle would become immortal. Anyone fancy their chances?" Of course, the Times article doesn't report the proposed ten-letter solution (they show a five-letter one), but they do mention the controversial word: "nonesevent". Are any of you interested in trying your hand at a better solution?
Article messed up the latin square (Score:5, Informative)
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
Which is the vertical flip of the stories' version. This one spells out the sentence in the same direction as Latin would be written (top to bottom). Also, this one generates more hits on google, with 19900 versus 1320 hits (with "SATOR AREPO" versus "AREPO SATOR").
The solution (Score:5, Informative)
There are two others mentioned, one of which contains the word "Orangutang", which is also mentioned in the Times article. Interestingly, this directory listing [gtoal.com] implies that the BENCHMARK file, which contains the above solution, was created no later than November 1999. Sorry - but I can't stop the ecode tage from inserting spaces into the text.
Re:Article messed up the latin square (Score:5, Informative)
The probable solve:
discu ssing
incan tator
scarl atina
carni tines
unlik eness
state swren
satin weave
itine rates
nones event
grass nests
What's up with slashdots lameness filter? The solution is lame now?
Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize: (Score:4, Informative)
What's the difference in computing a square where each position can be 1 of 2 values, vs 1 of 26??? We should only have to deal with the upper half of the square (as it needs to be diagonal)
So, for a square of size 10 you are looking at 55 open positions. The binary case has 2^55 possibilities. A mere 36,028,797,018,963,968 different squares that need to be checked. If you only use 26 letters you are looking at 26^55 different squares! That's 6.66091878 × 10^77 different squares. Even on a network of computers (seti@home, supercomputers, whatever) that is still going to take a loooong time.
The problem itself is super easy to run through a computer, it just takes years and years of time to compute. It's the same reason that the major encryption schemes still work. Their formulas may be known, but if you don't know the factors of a number with a thousand digits in it, you can't break it. The real kicker is no one has developed a method for finding factors quickly (at least quickly enough to make encryption obsolete!)
10 Letter Words (Score:3, Informative)
http://aaron.doosh.net/lexicon/10LetterWords.html [doosh.net]
Re:Orangutang (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The solution (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Article messed up the latin square (Score:2, Informative)
The square mentioned in the Times was discovered quite a few years ago, as you mentioned - however it was indeed discovered by Ted, who is a likeable is somewhat eccentric old buffer with a monomania for word squares.
What you may find interesting is the work we've done since on multi-lingual tensquares - see if you can find any of the articles by Rex Gooch or Ross Eckler. (eg http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb346/is_20
The privately-produced magazine Wordways has published the more interesting work on the subject.
It's not especially interesting from the computer science point of view, although the size of the problem at 10 or 11 does make it something worth doing on a large distributed system.
Best regards
Graha Toal
Re:Article messed up the latin square (Score:1, Informative)