Friday Quiz #9
Phil Pilgrim (PhiPi)
Posts: 23,514
Here's a quiz derived from one that appears every Sunday in the New York Times Magazine:
The object is to find as many common English words of seven letters or more (not proper nouns) that can be formed using the center letter and the letters surrounding it, in any order. Letters can be used more than once. Score one point for each word you find, plus an additional two points for a word that uses all seven letters.
The objective is to do this from your head -- i.e. not by writing a program that scans an English word list. When you think you have enough words, post your score here. Please do not post the words you've found, so as to give everyone an equal chance.
-Phil
P.S. Once enough people have responded, I'll open it up to a programming "golf" contest and provide a word list to see who can come up with the shortest program that accomplishes the task.
The object is to find as many common English words of seven letters or more (not proper nouns) that can be formed using the center letter and the letters surrounding it, in any order. Letters can be used more than once. Score one point for each word you find, plus an additional two points for a word that uses all seven letters.
The objective is to do this from your head -- i.e. not by writing a program that scans an English word list. When you think you have enough words, post your score here. Please do not post the words you've found, so as to give everyone an equal chance.
-Phil
P.S. Once enough people have responded, I'll open it up to a programming "golf" contest and provide a word list to see who can come up with the shortest program that accomplishes the task.
295 x 295 - 24K
Comments
The only significance to the layout is that each word must contain the center letter at least once. Otherwise, anything goes.
-Phil
Dangit! Now I'm back down to four....
Will take another look later and see if I can drum up more, if not, I head to the scrabble solver to see what obvious words I missed....
I am interested in other people's mental process in solving this. Here is what I was doing:
Started with P and worked around each other letter as second to come up with words.
Started with each other letter and worked around all letters as second
Used some common letter combos to find words.
Looked for double p, e, o, r and L words
Repeated steps above a few times...
Seven letter or more?
I was able to find three defensible words and an additional four that are contrived.
-Phil
Pretty much.
-Phil
Yeah, the style of the "P" was a bit of a gimme.
Pretty cool that the mother ship is really front and center.
-Phil
Here's a text file with 479K English words:
https://github.com/dwyl/english-words/blob/master/words.txt
If you use it with a program, it will produce 67 words, many contrived (re- and -er words), with one that uses all seven letters, also somewhat contrived.
BTW, my Perl program that found the 67 words is five lines long, including a line with a single right brace. Viva la regexes!
I wonder what the shortest Spin program reading the word list from an SD card would look like -- and how long it would take to execute ...
-Phil
Some are contrived.
-Phil
[img][/img]
So, my 23 is now 2.
Some are pretty questionable, IMO.
-Phil
EDIT: Could be Hawaiian and American Indian. Throw a little Mexican Spanish and French Canadian. The list goes on and on.. .