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?
Bah, why bother (Score:1, Interesting)
Abra-Melin? (Score:4, Interesting)
One which stuck in mind goes as follows:
ALLUP
LEIRU
LIGIL
URIEL
PULLA
When ritually consecrated they are said to be capable of producing magic effects; at least according to the mystics.
Anient Greeks? (Score:3, Interesting)
Gee, um... I bet it's either less or more difficult to do it in Ancient Greek than in English. Or maybe they ancient Greeks did it in English too?
Also, as the article states, one of his words does not appear in the dictionary. Now, maybe it's just me, but using words not found in the dictionary seems to make this task a little bit easier. He is basically saying "No one could solve this using real words, but I did using a (fake) one".
Only the Fool... (Score:5, Interesting)
Only the fool would take trouble to verify that his sentence was composed of ten a's, three b's, four c's, four d's, forty-six e's, sixteen f's, four g's, thirteen h's, fifteen i's, two k's, nine l's, four m's, twenty-five n's, twenty-four o's, five p's, sixteen r's, forty-one s's, thirty-seven t's, ten u's, eight v's, eight w's, four x's, eleven y's, twenty-seven commas, twenty-three apostrophes, seven hyphens and, last but not least, a single !
There's got to be a piece of math that finds the positions where all constraints are satisfied as in the above quote.
LanguageLog notes issues in the story (Score:5, Interesting)
There's no evidence that the composition of word squares, let alone 10-squares, was a pastime in ancient Greece.
And, there's the timeliness of the article:
[I]t's unclear why the Times thought that this was at all newsworthy, considering that Clarke announced his discovery of the square back in April 1999, in an issue of his e-zine WordsWorth.
Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize: (Score:3, Interesting)
Sparse space (Score:5, Interesting)
I've actually written a program to generate the Dutch solutions to the 5x5 puzzle somewhere around 1990, and it found several good solutions with a 210,000 word dictionary. However, it didn't find solutions for the 6x6 square. So I would expect that the 10x10 square is near impossible, unless wacky compounds would be allowed, since they are the only thing that can keep the letter combination filled...
Orangutang (Score:4, Interesting)
And the real solution to the problem seems obvious. Considering that the term "Cyber Monday" was only created two weeks ago but is now being reported by all the major news organizations as a real thing, it would seem to me that all one needs to do to solve this problem is to work out a solution where one or two of the words look reasonably well formed and sound ok even if they are in no dictionary. Then start using them, work them into some blogs, get them some mention in the news, and wait a year or two for them to show up as new words in the dictionary (what's a year or two to an immortal?) Problem solved.
Re:Orangutang (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Lifetime of immortality? (Score:2, Interesting)
One example would be program libraries. Just try to do something large without them.
Of course you could still do the same amount of work than before while using shortcuts, resulting in what you call "bottom line driven mindedness". But you *can* do more if you want to.
So "mindedness" does not have to result from "shortcuts", does it?
On the other side a wise man once said: The amount of intelligence on the planet is constant. It's just the amount of poeple that rises. (no exact quote)
So i recommend just being happy that you - evolutionary - will be the most successful one if you are "top line driven" *and* use use shortcuts.
And one final thing: I totally agree with you if you wanted to say that today poeple just get lazy and stupid.
But why is this so?
My actual thought - based on what i know - is that there are three causes.
1. The more poeple you have, and the more comfort they have, the less hard it is to survive, making you lazyer.
2. Big companies create a feedback loop of stupidness by making their products and services easyer and easyer, allowing us cause 1, forcing them to make even more easy stuff to expose from others.
3. Governments act too focused on short-term things so they don't see that good education is probably the best thing to stimulate economic growth, even if it's a long-term investion. And because the government is made out of poeple that got education from a former government, this also creates a negative feedback loop.
My final thought - so i can also come up with a solution - would be, to
1. invest the most of a country's budget to education and so investing - indirectly - in pretty much everything positive, and
2. creating an evironment where companies can expose themselves positively from others by creating more advanced products including simplified versions of older products and services as parts, and so making life easyer while still hilding a minimum level of expected intelligence.
if poeple weren't lazy as a basic rule of evolution, then you could leave away the second point. Bbut i giess this is just a unrealisitc dream.
So who wants to become our next president and find out how to realize this in practice?
Re:Abra-Melin? (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said, I've never actually read any Abra-Melin grimoire [wikipedia.org]. Instead, the article reminded me of a chapter from a book I read when younger entitled The Encyclopedia of Mind, Magic & Mysteries (isbn: 0-86318-639-4).
The aforementioned "magic square" was printed on page 100.
Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it wouldn't be that difficult to create an algorithm that would theoretically solve this problem. I say "theoretically" because this assumes that you have infinite time and infinite memory.
Exhaustively testing all the combinations from a dictionary of 10-letter words would have such an astronomical computational complexity that even the fastest computers or clusters wouldn't be able to do it in a lifetime.
That's not to say that there's no such thing as an algorithm that could do it in a different way, but that's the challenge, isn't it? Coming up with heuristics and filters and such so that it could be done in a reasonable amount of time is harder than it sounds.
Give it a shot. I'm sure you'll see what I mean.
This was Catweazle's magic chant... (Score:2, Interesting)