pianoforte611 comments on Open thread, Mar. 16 - Mar. 22, 2015 - Less Wrong

6 Post author: MrMind 16 March 2015 08:13AM

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Comment author: pianoforte611 23 March 2015 03:39:43AM 0 points [-]

I wonder how long it would have taken someone to find one of those without using a script. The human mind is pretty good at word based puzzles, but that's a very short list and a pretty wacky criteria.

Comment author: Falacer 23 March 2015 07:10:29PM 1 point [-]

I thought about it for about 5 minutes before deciding to script it, and got "fobs" and, annoyingly, dismissed "fres" as not a word.

I imagine if I had been more rigorous it wouldn't have taken long to get all the 4 letter ones, since they all have an internal vowel, which was the obvious place to start looking.

Comment author: Vaniver 24 March 2015 08:50:07PM 0 points [-]

It seems to me like you could generate the 26 pairs-- an, bo, cp, etc.-- and then try to make words out of nesting those pairs (fobs is "ob" surrounded by "fs"). But the hard part is checking whether or not something is a word, and nesting is a pretty weird action unrelated to the sound or content of words.

But now I have idea for a Scrabble-esque game...