A Solution for the Ten Letter Acrostic Puzzle?

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?

Comments

my answer

[mikeh9741]

Anyone fancy their chances? NO ON

Re:my answer

[mikeh9741]

Anyone fancy their chances?

NO
ON

Re:my answer

[AndroidCat]

Is that your final answer?

Re:my answer

[mikeh9741]

NO
ON

Article messed up the latin square

[dascandy]

The actual square is:

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").

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[dascandy]

And the 10-word squares can be found at http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/wordsquare/BENCHMAR K

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:Article messed up the latin square

[dascandy]

Why would greeks gain immortality by making a solution in latin anyway?

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it's a horizontal flip.

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[Bloater]

This one is also curiously palindromic, with lines of reflectional symmetry at 45 degress and 135 degrees, and rotational symmetry.

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry to disappoint, folks: the 10-squares in the file you mention above were not discovered by my program - in fact there's a very small word list also in that directory ( http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/wordsquare/update.1 0.txt ) which contained words known to make 10-squares, which I was using as a Q.A. check for my code. (Hence the filename 'benchmark')

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_200 408/ai_n5540701 )

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

[Anonymous Coward]

It couldn't be any other way.

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[p00ya]

It couldn't be any other way.

Sure it could: it doesn't need the line of symmetry going from top-left to bottom-right.

ABCDE
BGHIJ
CHLMN
DIMOP
EJNPQ

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[p00ya]

Er.. that should have been "it only needs".

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[computational super]

Those acrostic puzzles are all greek to me.

Re:Article messed up the latin square

[Gordonjcp]

Uhm, no, because it doesn't read "ABCDE" bottom to top on the right hand side.

Lifetime of immortality?

[Anonymous Coward]

The creator of the ten-letter acrostic would acheive "a lifetime of immortality"...

that's useful, hm?

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Tony Hoyle]

It's the same as a 'lifetime guarantee'.

Once it fails, that's the life over, hence no guarantee...

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a lifetime guarantee on my artificial heart. Oh, wait...

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you missed the point. The Greeks appreciated and had respect for thought, logic and mental prowess for its own sake. No doubt someone achieving at that level(10x10), sans computer, would have been a formidable mind indeed! No doubt an immortal in his time. Now if only so many cultures today weren't so concerned with shortcut, bottom line driven mindedness.

hm

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Immortality may well have meant in memory in the same way as many of their greatest philosophers.

Even today names such as Archimedes and Plato are known by everyone... even some people who do not know who they were have still heard of them.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Hurricane78]

Isn't it actually *more* intelligent to use shortcuts, since it allows you to finish a task quicker. This again allows you to do more complex tasks and more work in the same amount of time. So you archieve bigger targets than anyone not using that "shortcuts".

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:Lifetime of immortality?

[Anonymous Coward]

Roger Millington, author of The Strange World of Crosswords, who has traced the origins of the acrostic to Ancient Greece, wrote that the creator of the first accepted ten-letter square would achieve "a lifetime of immortality".

Everyone please read this sentence again, or for the first time.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Dachannien]

Perhaps the intention was to have them bronzed.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[mattmatt]

"Lifetime of immortality" - You will spend your entire life without dying.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[innocent_white_lamb]

Two-Part warranty: If it breaks, you own both pices.

Lifetime guarantee: When it quits, we kill you.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Kingrames]

Better than a lifetime of immorality.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[woolio]

"a lifetime of immortality"...

That's even better than the "up to or higher" scam...

The Greeks really were quite advanced!

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[drsquare]

You're saying that today no-one cares about thought, logic or mental prowess for its own sake? What's Mensa about then? Why do people do number puzzles or crosswords?

Or are you saying that ancient Greek tradesmen didn't care about the bottom line, but ignored their market stalls to think about letter puzzles?

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[SamSim]

Not wishing to be pedantic - well, actually I love being pedantic. If "immortal" is used in the sense of "unkillable" then it is possible to be immortal for a finite period of time. But here it is pretty stupid, yes.

Re:Lifetime of immortality?

[Pantero Blanco]

Most Greeks probably didn't care. Greece, however, managed to have both great military power and a system of morals that allowed the intellectuals they DID have to do what they do best.

  It only lasted for a certain amount of time before they divided into two groups, anyway: one that was martial and moralistic and one that had more intellectuals, but was decadent.

Solution to the solution

[jerometremblay]

Change the dictionary.

Re:Solution to the solution

[qwerty shrdlu]

For example, use modern English instead of anchient Greek. You get a lot more words to play with that way.

Re:Solution to the solution

[AndroidCat]

nonesevent: (n) A word which must exist to solve that damned ten letter acrostic puzzle.

Re:Solution to the solution

[Haydn Fenton]

Hahahaha! Ahhh, where are the mod points when you need them?

Re:Solution to the solution

[marcello_dl]

But we already have a perfect language for such acrostic thingies:

perl.

Oh, and maybe whitespace

Re:Solution to the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonesevent

Re:Solution to the solution

[MarkRose]

How perfectly cromulent.

Re:Solution to the solution

[Hosiah]

"None's Event" An event for no-one and nothing; a party for the hell of it. "Get a keg while you're out, we're planning a none's event!"

Re:Solution to the solution

[AndroidCat]

Yeehah! Everyone knows that those Acrostic letter-man jocks like to party hearty when the team wins!

Re:Solution to the solution

[Anonymous Coward]

nonesevent: (n) My new password.

The solution

[alanw]

This posting by Ted Clarke on the Yahoo! group wordgame-programmers announces his tensquare acrostic

DISCUSSING
INCANTATOR
SCARLATINA
CARNITINES
UN LIKENESS
STATESWREN
SATINWEAVE
ITINERATES
NONE SEVENT
GRASSNESTS
</tt>

There are two others mentioned, one of which contains the word "Orangutang", which is also mentioned in the Times article. Interestingly, this directory listing 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:The solution

[passingNotes.com]

dudes, i'm not a fan of the implied spacing for none sevent (versus nones event) - and there should not be a hyphen...this is really like pissing and moaning over the grains and winnowing to find the valid phrases...but i do agree with that commentary below - why not just add it to wikipedia!?

Re:The solution

[Anonymous Coward]

Well done to him :)

Although it seems like an easy thing to do (albeit time consuming) using a computer once you have a list of all the words of proper lenght. If the words are in sorted in memory and all, and with some optimization, it could be pretty quick perhaps. If there aren't too many 10 letter words (not sure)then a new fast computer could try 'em all pretty quick. Feed it a different word list and slightly tweak the code and it'll work for any lenght of words... Someone very keen with a complete word list could even have the program pre-sort all the words by leght and alphabetical order and try to fill the grid for every lenght possible (every combinations). It doesn't even sound hard to do, the worst part seems to be acquiring the word lists (good ones).

There's just much more credit to doing it by hand centuries ago.

Re:The solution

[darkmeridian]

According to this article, this solution is contested. First of all, it uses compound words. Secondly, the word "nonesevent" may be made up or a bastardized version of "noneevent". Still, it is apparently considered the best attempt anyone has made without repeating words with the same sound.

Re:The solution

[tomjen]

You could try /usr/dict/words.
But if you solve it now - using a computer or otherwise - the best you will get is a mention i a online newspaper article. Today nobody cares about how smart you are.

Re:The solution

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two others mentioned, one of which contains the word "Orangutang",


...Which should invalidate it, since the correct spelling is orangutan.

Re:The solution

[yarbo]

here, I've got it started for you, it's sorted alphabetically and contains all 10 letter words yarbo@hydrogen temp$ cat 10letter.py dic = open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines() dic10 = filter(lambda x:len(x)==10,dic) print len(dic10) yarbo@hydrogen temp$ python2.3 10letter.py 6093

Re:The solution

[Anonymous Coward]

oops, forgot to click plain text

yarbo@hydrogen temp$ cat 10letter.py
dic = open("/usr/share/dict/words").readlines()
dic10 = filter(lambda x:len(x)==10,dic)
print len(dic10)

yarbo@hydrogen temp$ python2.3 10letter.py
6093

Re:The solution

[Bloater]

>But if you solve it now - using a computer or otherwise - the best you will get is a mention i a online newspaper article.

Unless you do it in polynomial time, in which case the men in black would like a word with you.

Re:The solution

[metallel]

I don't even know where to begin. If it's so easy to do, why are there no acceptable solutions yet? My dictionary (which is by no means complete) has 14585 10 letter words. Assuming that the first letters of the words are, on average fairly evenly distributed across the alphabet, you would have 14585 * 560^9 or about 7.89 * 10^28 candidate acrostics to go through. Assuming you can evaluate a million per second, it would still take 2.5 quadrillion years to go through all of them. Obviously, you can optimize things so that most partial solutions are thrown out fairly early on. But it's still non-trivial. And no, getting a faster computer won't help much. Unless you make it trillions of times faster, or get one cheap and small enough that you can buy millions more.

Re:The solution

[Anonymous Coward]

It's spelled "length".

Re:The solution

[Anonymous Coward]

My dictionary (which is by no means complete) has 14585 10 letter words. Assuming that the first letters of the words are, on average fairly evenly distributed across the alphabet, you would have 14585 * 560^9 or about 7.89 * 10^28 candidate acrostics to go through.

There are much better ways to do it. My first attempt at an algorithm would be to choose rows and columns alternately. With the assumptions you used:

1st row: 14585 possibilities
1st col: *= 561
2nd row: *= 561
2nd col: *= 22
3rd row: *= 22

After that, you would almost always have only zero or one possibilities. So the total number of trials is only about 2.2e12. This is extremely doable, even on a home PC. Furthermore, if you eliminate a square when you have filled in N columns, then you can eliminate as possibilities for the first row and first column all words beginning with those N letters. [*]

Of course, the assumption of even distribution of letters is not really true. Nor are the letters within a word independent of each other. (Due to prefixes, suffixes, word 'stems', spelling rules, the very existence of syllables, etc.)

This means that you will exclude more possibile squares with the first few steps than we would have naively assumed, especially if the method marked as [*] is used. But on the other hand, those possibilities that survive are likely to survive longer than one might have guessed. The net of the two effects depends on the actual distribution, but as they tend to work against each other and may be roughly the same size, we could crudely estimate that they tend to cancel each other out.

And if such correlations do turn out to cause more harm than good, then it could be counteracted by using some different order, e.g., starting with row #1, then choosing column #10, then row #7, then column #4, etc., since the first and tenth letters will be much less correlated then the first and second letters.

Solution not valid

[jurt1235]

The solution is not valid if the word does not exist in a dictionary. Does an encyclopedia count as a dictionary? If so I would say:
Long live Wikipedia.
Just add the word, and the puzzle is solved.
Probably the ancient greeks solved it too once, since out of frustration comes the simple answer:
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA
AAAAAAAAAA

Re:Solution not valid

[Timesprout]

You solution intrigues me and I wish to subscribe to your AAAAAAAAAA.

Re:Solution not valid

[bhtooefr]

No, but Wiktionary does.

So does Urban Dictionary.

So does Merriam-Webster Open Dictionary.

Re:Solution not valid

[Anonymous Coward]

Close enough?

Re:Solution not valid

[Anonymous Coward]

Your solution is correct!
At least your word is in the vocabulary of my stammering boss. He uses it whenever I ask him about the holidays or salary increase.

Re:Solution not valid

[jpetts]

Perhaps he meant the CamAAAAAAAAAA?

Re:Solution not valid

[Anonymous Coward]

AHAHA HAHAH
HAHA HAHAHA
AHAHA HAHAH
HAHAH AHAHA
AHAH AHAHAH
HAHAH AHAHA
AHAHAH AHAH
HAHAHA HAHA
AHAHA HAHAH
HAHAHA HAHA

ahh! it hurts laughing so much!

--------
  urgh I encountered the lameness filter

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Re:Solution not valid

[Anonymous Coward]

Ten four, that's a roflcopter, good buddy!

Re:Solution not valid

[flatface]

Maybe he was dictating?

Re:Solution not valid

[B2382F29]

Or maybe khAAAAAAAAAAn!

What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Re:What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[stienman]

It's a perfectly cromulent word.

-Adam

Re:What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[millette]

It embiggens clarity.

Re:What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[cryptochrome]

kwijibo: a big hairy north american ape

Re:What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm...it's spelled Kwyjibo.

(ok...how anal am I that I'm playing spelling nazi for a made-up word???)

Re:What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[qwijibo]

Yeah, really. The nerve of people misspelling a made up word.

Jut make a program...

[4D6963]

Couldn't one make a program that could use a whole dictionnary to try to make one of these, and try lots of dictionnaries of different languages?

If one could have such a completly-automated program (because Clark's wasn't) and tried many dictionnaries, how knows...

Maybe will we see emerging something like a Acrostic@Home grid computing program?

Re:Jut make a program...

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't one make a program that could use a whole dictionnary to try to make one of these, and try lots of dictionnaries of different languages?

Just put it behind Port 22, the Russian hackers will figure it out

Re:Jut make a program...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe will we see emerging something like a Acrostic@Home grid computing program?

Yes, but what happens when you have a million computers connected to each other and granted immortality?

Skynet..

Re:Jut make a program...

[Undefined Parameter]

Either that or the greatest Beowulf cluster EVAR!!!11!

~UP

Re:Jut make a program...

[Drakonite]

Maybe will we see emerging something like a Acrostic@Home grid computing program?

Or someone will take 5 seconds to realize that the slowest part would be putting a dictionary onto a computer, and with that step already completed a single computer could do all the possible permutations in a very short ammount of time... no grid computing needed.

Re:Jut make a program...

[4D6963]

Probably, but I barely even understood what the problem exactly is. Anyways, what prevents anyone from amkin such a program? Personally what prevents me from doing that is not understanding what it should do...

Re:Jut make a program...

[Drakonite]

There is nothing stopping someone from creating such a program. Which is sorta my point... there is no technological hurdle to overcome as people before me were trying to say.. The only limiting factor is how many 10 letter words you can think of/find and enter into the database for your program.

If you provided a file containing a list of all the 10 letter words, this is exactly the type of problem you'd give someone as part of a test for a beginners programming class...

Re:Jut make a program...

[4D6963]

And can't you just take some english dictionnary file (don't ask me where you'd get it from, maybe some program, or maybe such files exist for such purposes..) and get the 10-letter words out of it? The solution to this problem almost sounds too simple to find...

Bah, why bother

[Seiruu]

When the word doesn't even exists? What could they possibly ponder over? If it's not in the dictionary, then shut the hell up.

Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[republican gourd]

0000000000000000 - (lameness filter
0000000000000010 - sure is great
0000000000000000 - there are carrots
0000000000000000 - on my plate
0000000000000000 - I have a buick
0000000000000000 - which I hate
0000000000000000 - I cut my kittens
0000000000000000 - into bait
0000000000000000 - la la la la
0000000000000000 - lameness filter
0000000000000000 - is this enough yet?
0000000000000000 - I realize the kitten line
0000000000000000 - may be a bit offensive
0000000000000000 - I'm a supporter of felinism, I swear
0100000000000010 - I just think that a kitten's place
0000000000000001 - is in the kitchen)

I don't see the big deal. How is this one of the big puzzles in computer science again?

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[Anonymous Coward]

You repeated one of your words. The best solution would have unique words for each line.

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[swilde23]

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!)

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[Triple Click]

That's a lot more possibilities than you need.

Just preprocess a set of known dictionaries and extract all ten-letter words. Add an option of prefixes and suffixes. For every word in that list, take each letter individually and search through the dictionary for words beginning with that letter. Check the result after each letter to see if conditions are held.

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[caffeinemessiah]

That's not quite correct. The state space of this problem is greatly reduced because you're constraining each row or column to be a word from the dictionary. As a result, you don't have a choice of 26 for each grid cell, or 26^10 for each row or column. If you use a 100,000 word dictionary, you're looking at approximately 100000^10 choices for the whole puzzle, which is large, but not completely unmanageable.

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[swilde23]

I know what you guys are saying, and yes you are correct. But do you happen to have a dictionary of binary words in it? I was simply pointing out the differences between what the op was saying, and what the problem required. (we could also narrow down the search space by knowing that we shouldn't have duplicate words, but that is way to much thinking for this early on a Sunday)

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[dslauson]

"I don't see the big deal. How is this one of the big puzzles in computer science again?"

Yeah, that seems to be a common sentiment here. That's because apparently nobody here took an algorithms class.

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.

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[bcattwoo]

you're looking at approximately 100000^10 choices for the whole puzzle

It is even somewhat less than that because once you choose the first word the starting letter of each of the other nine words is already determined. Once the second word is chosen, then the first and secord letter of each subsequent word is also determined. By the time you get to the last word you are only free to choose the last letter of that word!

Re:Easy, heres one with a 2 byte wordsize:

[Surt]

Even better, I suspect there are no where near 100,000 10 letter words in any dictionary. The OED is only about 600,000 words total, and I'm guessing that far less than 1 in 6 words is ten letters long.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oxford_English_Dictio nary

And a computer program trying to perform this analysis can clearly do a lot of cleverness about things like hashing all the valid 3 letter combinations so I bet an exhaustive search could be performed in 50,000 ^ 5 or less. That's in the range of only 10^23. That'd be computible by a million computers in a few years.

These words are all cruvis.

[kyle90]

They're giving me a fronache.

Re:These words are all cruvis.

[Sebilrazen]

Watch SG-1 much?

Just wait a year

[Animus Howard]

Next year's English Oxford Dictionary will have an entry for that last word.

"Noun;The only word in the 2005 ten-letter acrostic solution which did not appear in a dictionary at the time."

Re:Just wait a year

[AlecC]

Or better "Noun: a ten letter acrostic"

Re:Just wait a year

[ediron2]

Hey, while the other reply ('a 10 letter acrostic') is an elegant idea, it won't get a lot of use. All we need to do is to pick some fun daily-usable meaning and run with it.

I nominate: nonesevant, noun, Pronounced: NUN-sev-ant, Possessing horrifyingly-bad managerial skills, as in Dilbert's pointy-haired boss was a nonesevant twit. See: nonesevance, renonesevance (like recidivism, falling back into pointy-hairedness), noneseveral, noneseved, and (of course) nonesense (a misguided belief that you're a good manager when you're not).

Between WTFKenneth, InSoviet, AllYourBase, Goatse, JonKatz (I put them adjacent for maximum comedic value), Old Koreans, Our*Overlords, and all the other geek memes slashdot has formed, we might as well invent ourselves a word.

Oh, and this is admittedly a lot like 'frindle', if you don't have kids that know the story.

Attention, this is the NSA

[martinultima]

We at the United States National Security Agency hereby order you to stop posting on this thread immediately. The solution to this puzzle is clearly of great value to our national defense and therefore is to be used only with proper authorization from us. Big Brother is watching, and any further discussion will be appropriately terminated. And yes we will know. Now get back to work finding some more prime numbers, we need those too.

Re:Attention, this is the NSA

[AndroidCat]

How about an acrostic that uses Setec Astronomy?

Abra-Melin?

[calharding]

This brings to mind something I read once about the "Abra-Melin" squares connected to the work of SL Macgreggor Mathers and Aleister Crowley.

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.

Re:Abra-Melin?

[Ithika]

And if you believe that, I have a ten-letter acrostic (comes with free lifetime immortality) you may be interested in buying...

Re:Abra-Melin?

[Achra]

You should be really careful about posting those, you know. The fact that that one _stuck in your mind_ should be a warning. Lord only knows what that one is _supposed_ to do, but if you read that book, there aren't any acrostics to generate "supposed mystical effects". More like "Smite down your neighbor with boils" or "Create tempests of snow" or whatever. I'm not saying it's not all a bunch of bullshit.. I'm just saying, be careful what you're playing with. Trivializing something doesn't necessarily make it trivial.

Re:Abra-Melin?

[calharding]

I fully agree, and even though I don't put much stock into this kind of thing, I do find it fascinating and never intended to seem flippant about it.
That being said, I've never actually read any Abra-Melin grimoire. 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:Abra-Melin?

[meringuoid]

but if you read that book, there aren't any acrostics to generate "supposed mystical effects". More like "Smite down your neighbor with boils" or "Create tempests of snow" or whatever.

Um. Let me see, create tempests of snow by writing out acrostic squares? How is that not a supposed mystical effect? The only way I can imagine for it not to be a supposed mystical effect is if it is an actual mystical effect, and I don't see snow here.

Re:Abra-Melin?

[Achra]

Well, lucky for you that's not the acrostic for snow. :P

I would get into the theory and practice with you, but I really doubt you're interested. The simple fact is that: Yes, we're talking about "actual mystical effects". Buy a copy of the book and perform the experiments yourself if you like, but like anything else, make sure to follow ALL of the directions, including the 6 month purification period. You might be pleasantly/unpleasantly surprised, depending on how narrow your worldview is.

Not in dictionary? Nonsense.

[nurhussein]

"Nonesevent" is a perfectly cromulent word.

Re:Not in dictionary? Nonsense.

[kermitthefrog917]

wow... i thought the problem with slashdot was duplicated stories... now we have duplicated comments????

Re:Not in dictionary? Nonsense.

[isny]

>> "Nonesevent" is a perfectly cromulent word.

Sounds like something a kwyjibo would say.

Re:Not in dictionary? Nonsense.

[Shano]

Damn, first we had duplicate stories, now we have duplicate comments.

Honestly, what's Slashdot coming to?

Re:Not in dictionary? Nonsense.

[jrockway]

Not only is the GP a duplicate, the reply is too! At least this time it was spelled right.

(But seriously people... if you think what you're about to say is obvious, and there are already comments, read them before posting. Somebody probably beat you to it. Funny doesn't raise your karma, but Redundant does lower it... think before you post :)

Solution inevitable

[Anonymous Coward]

The english language is constantly acquiring words but not decommissioning them. It would seem to reason that over time the english language would accumulate enough words to solve this puzzle. Even if it is not solved yet, how many words will be added in the near future that will provide a solution? My guess is that it's only a matter of time.

Done.

[Anonymous Coward]

Check it out: http://www3.merriam-webster.com/opendictionary/new word_display_recent.php

Can I have my lifetime of immortality now please?

Duh

[matt me]

I don't think the Greeks were using the Oxford dictionary.

Anient Greeks?

[ThatGeek]

The ancient Greeks believed that the solver of the ten letter puzzle would become immortal..

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".

Re:Anient Greeks?

[Haydn Fenton]

Using english would at seem much easier at first, since the English langauge has more words than any other language (I can't find this fact on wikipedia, but I'm sure I remember it from somewhere credible). This is mainly because we steal words from other languages ( Schadenfreude off the top of my head, from German 'to take pleasure from others misfortune') and we meld words to make new ones all the time ( meld itself comes from melt and weld - or possibly another German word, Melden, according to reference.com). Because we have the biggest vocab it's more probable that it's easier to use English instead of any other language, but when you think about it, all that matters is that you have enough 10-letter words with the right letter combinations that you can use them all to make a 10-letter acrostic puzzle. I'm not much of an expert on languages, but there's porbably a language more suited to this than English.

Re:Anient Greeks?

[tom8658]

Actually, languages like Latin and Greek are more suited to this type of puzzle than English. Because informal Latin and Greek have no enforced word order, you can use whatever words you like as long as they are in the correct cases and still form a sentence. Most languages now have deprecated their noun declinsions, or augmented them with a word order system (like German).

Re:Anient Greeks?

[Chubby_C]

but the greeks didn't have our dictionary when they proposed the puzzle, did they?

how do we know this isn't a long lost word that is the solution?

Re:Anient Greeks?

[Anonymous Coward]

maybe they ancient Greeks did it in English too?

actually, ancient greeks did it up the pooper with young boys. Much like CmdrTaco, Zonk, Hemos, Cowboi Kneel, etc.

Re:Anient Greeks?

[scottblascocomposer]

I agree, it probably is either less or more difficult. You make an excellent observation...

:)

Re:Anient Greeks?

[Pranadevil2k]

Over the course of filling the grid out he was forced to use the "word" nonesevant in order to fit in the other words. Use your head, dude.

Only the Fool...

[headkase]

Reminds me of a bit of Hofstader's Metamagical Themas:

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.

Re:Only the Fool...

[Anonymous Coward]

Without fooling, shouldn't there be at least twenty-six apostrophes?

Re:Only the Fool...

[headkase]

I think it was as close as it could be made... ;)

Re:Only the Fool...

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope, since there are only twenty-three apostrophes in the text.

Re:Only the Fool...

[/ASCII]

Nope. There are only 23 different kinds of letters in the sentence. No q's for example.

Re:Only the Fool...

[Anonymous Coward]

If the sentence contained and j's, q's, or z's. Which it doesn't.

Re:Only the Fool...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called a self-enumerating pangram.

The shortest one is probably the Dutch "Vijf v's, vijf ij's, vijf f's, vijf s's."
(Where 'ij' is considered one letter.)

Re:Only the Fool...

[Piquan]

While it is a self-enumerating sentence, it (and the Dutch one you gave) are not pangrams. As the link you so thoughtfully provided details, pangrams use every letter of the alphabet.

Re:Only the Fool...

[retiarius]

E.g.

          Jocks vend, fix, quartz BMW glyph

announced 23 April 1984 on Usenet net.puzzle
as a waste of 6 hours VAX 11/750 time by ames!jaw

Addressing two separate efforts, the oft-referenced
Scientific American article of October, 1984 mixed up the
nomenclature by referring to the Lee Sallows "pangram machine"
which really spit out self-enumerating sentences.

The confusion stems from the fact that in that column,
Prof. A. K. Dewdney discussed both Sallows' effort and my own
(pure multi-word anagram software hacks) as kindred topics.
Although, together with Mike Morton, we helped start a
bit of a mania with non-numerical recursive Unix codes,
it's always humbling to see mere mortals attempt such logological
pasttimes "by hand", resorting to the crutch of Scrabble tiles
only as needed.

Re:Only the Fool...

[rob_squared]

Its not so foolish if you just grep'd a text file of it. :)

Re:Only the Fool...

[bulliver]

In fact I wrote a python script which finds these sentences (called a "self-documenting panagram"). You can change the seed to make your own sentence. See the code here

I'm just a hobbiest, I'm sure a CS dude could make it better, as the script basically brute-forces it...

A lifetime of immortality?

[jesser]

Does that mean you'll be immortal until you die?

Re:A lifetime of immortality?

[Bob of Dole]

I want to live until I die. No more, no less - Eddie Izzard

"nonesevent" not in google

[RhettLivingston]

The only Google hits on nonesevent have to do with this puzzle. The remarkable thing here is not the solving of the puzzle, its the solving of the puzzle with a word so completely fake that even Google hasn't seen its likes before.

Re:"nonesevent" not in google

[Vanye1]

However, the word nones is.

From m-w.com
Main Entry: 4none
Pronunciation: 'nOn
Function: noun
Usage: often capitalized
Etymology: Late Latin nona, from Latin, 9th hour of the day from sunrise -- more at NOON
: the fifth of the canonical hours

A google define:nones query results in:
# n the old Roman calendar, the ninth day before Ides. The 7th of March, May, July and October and the 5th of other months. See Calends, Nones & Ides
www.highdown.reading.sch.uk/highdown/pupil/time/ca lendars/terms.html

# the 5th or 7th day of the month, depending on the month, in Roman dating
medievalwriting.50megs.com/glossary2.htm

# ninth day before the ides (hence 5th or 7th of month, since Romans counted both ends of the number series).
www.stockton.edu/~roman/fiction/vocab3.htm

# the fifth of the seven canonical hours; about 3 p.m.
wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Looks to me like this isn't a single word, rather a compound word. Perhaps it should be hyphenated, if written out...

Re:"nonesevent" not in google

[Anonymous Coward]

nonesevent - n. The word that completes the first 10-letter acrostic in the English language.

There. Now it even has a definition!

Re:"nonesevent" not in google

[marko123]

Just because it's not on google doesn't mean it doesn't exist... ahhh, who am I kidding?

Re:"nonesevent" not in google

[SamSim]

I guess noneseventually it was the only way to solve it.

One slight difference

[njfuzzy]

If I remember correctly, there were about 20,000 words in the ancient Greek language. There are over 300,000 and counting in English. I think it's safe to say we're practically cheating. The problem was probably impossible in their time, but not in ours.

Re:One slight difference

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem was probably impossible in their time

Isn't it cheating to ask someone to solve a problem that cannot be solved?

Re:One slight difference

[mfukar]

"..there were about 20,000 words in the ancient Greek language..." May I ask what your sources are on this? It interests me a lot.

Re:One slight difference

[njfuzzy]

Honestly, my only sources are vague memories from Greek classes in college about seven years ago.

Re:One slight difference

[cnoocy]

Well, my Groves' Greek and English dictionary (1859) has 613 pages of (very roughly) 90 entries each, which is 55,170, within an order of magnitude of the offerred 20,000. I'm sure better sources exist, but it's probably safe to say that the full surviving corpus of Ancient Greek has significantly fewer words than the corpus of Modern English. (Insert "Melt With You" joke here.) It's a benefit of having a global, literate, society with billions of speakers.

Re:One slight difference

[n8willis]

Well, but dictionary words are just the bases, correct? I seem to remember that Greek has more tenses & so on than English. Whereas English doesn't alter root words as much, relying on "helping verbs" -- or whatever the scientific words for those are.

By which I'm not saying that ancient Greek had *more* words than modern English, but depending on whether Greek has more cases, tenses and voices, et cetera, (sorry for the Latin...) the variations could significantly close the gap when considering the actual words available.

N

Re:One slight difference

[joranbelar]

A more apt comparison would be the number of 10-letter words in both languages. Any clues on that front?

Re:One slight difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Nuts! My dictionary has a supplement which alone contain 20k words. They are words discovered only 1940 to 1990. This supplement has 320 pages. Main dictionary has 2042 pages and is set in even smaller font. So, we have no less than 20000*((2042/320)+1) words.

Re:One slight difference

[njfuzzy]

Well, Ancient Greek is certainly known for compound words, in a style that would allow them a lot of very long words. However, English inherits many such words from German, Latin, and Ancient Greek itself. I can't imagine a valid way to compare, but my gut tells me we dwarf them on that count too.

Re:One slight difference

[cnoocy]

That's a very good point, especially for verbs. The limited set of letters used in the various inflectional endings does constrain the later words in the square somewhat, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. And English certainly doesn't have the same letter frequency at both ends of the word.

LanguageLog notes issues in the story

[h4ter]

Benjamin Zimmer over at Language Log notes some problems with the story. Most notably:

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:LanguageLog notes issues in the story

[Bongoots]

Just as on TV they have re-runs, on Slashdot they have dupes and The Times is feeding us news that is over 6 and a half years old!

You have to love the Christmas season :)

Re:LanguageLog notes issues in the story

[Cardbox]

The Times article says that the construction of English 10x10 word squares has been a problem since the time of the ancient Greeks.

Certainly people can't have made much progress on it for 2 millennia or so, until English had evolved and modern English spelling had been invented.

Tabloid format, tabloid thinking.

Re:LanguageLog notes issues in the story

[Frogg]

my guess why it got into The Times... maybe someone blogged about this subject recently? /me ducks and runs for cover

-1, Plagiarism

[The Hobo]

Cursory Google search

Try to offer a comment instead of copying and pasting other people's work next time

german...

[CaptnMArk]

If you're German, you just put 4 5x5 solutions together and you are done :)

Re:german...

[kermitthefrog917]

Even Easier... you will only actually need two
5x5 A and 5x5 B

A B
B A

Etymology nazi!

[jesser]

According to Mr Clarke the word, perhaps more correctly nones-event, is an event that takes place during a period of the month known as the nones by the Ancient Romans, rather like the Ides of March.

In other words, he combined two Latin-based words to solve an English version of a Greek puzzle.

Suddenly, English neologisms that combine Latin and Greek don't bother me at all.

the purpose of puzzles

[Anonymous Coward]

is not necessarily to solve the puzzle.

it is to exercise one's brain.

thus a 'computer solution' is kind of irrelevant, other than being a semi boring technical exercise.

like programming a computer to play tic tac toe, or cards.

Re:the purpose of puzzles

[Urusai]

One of the classic "beginner" programs is tic-tac-toe. You don't get to write chess programs until the second semester.

That's easy

[Anonymous Coward]

There are 300,000 word in an english dictionary. Hence, there are no more than
300,000^10 possible solutions (it's much less, of course, since the number of 10-letter words is much less than 300,000). That makes the problem easier than braking a 256-bit chiffre. Pfft -- lazy greeks.

They Were Right About the Whole Immortality Thing

[tnsimonson]

I solved this puzzle when I was a kid back in 352 A.D.

I dont see a problem

[mrsalty]

Nonesevent is a perfectly cromulent word.

Re:I dont see a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we even get comments that are dupes? Only on Slashdot!

Re:I dont see a problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Now we get dupe comments that are dupes? Only on Slashdot!

Re:I dont see a problem

[Mathiasdm]

In Sovjet Russia, Slashdot comments dupe you!

Sparse space

[tgv]

It's a sparseness problem. The space of two letter words is pretty full, but as the length of the words increases, the number of words does not increase as fast as the number of possible combinations.

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...

Re:Sparse space

[Keith McClary]

I've actually written a program to generate the Dutch solutions to the 5x5 puzzle

How does the time needed to find all NxN solutions grow with N?

Re: Sparse space

[tgv]

Can't reconstruct it, as the code is long buried, but the complexity would be O(k^N), where k is the number of words of length N. This is however not an good upper bound for an efficient implementation, as the first word limits the choice of the second word with a factor 26 (well, the alphabet size of first positions, to be precise) on average. Choosing the second word will limit the choice of the third word with a factor 26^2, since the first two letters are now fixed, etc. For choosing the last word, a single lookup would suffice (but that won't list all posibilities). So a better estimation would be O(k * k / 26 * k / 26^2 ...) = O(k^N / 26^((N-1)(N-2)/2)).

That actually demonstrates the sparseness problem: the second term grows much faster than the first.

Re:Sparse space

[ockegheim]

Admittedly English has more words than Dutch, but last summer, with nothing to do at work, my girlfriend came up with

FLIGHT
LINEAR
INCISE
GEISHA
HASHED
TREADS

...unaided by a computer. I was very proud of her.

Re:Sparse space

[ockegheim]

Vertex Operator posted his page which includes a 7x7 Dutch square.

Re:Sparse space

[merlin_jim]

The space of two letter words is pretty full, but as the length of the words increases, the number of words does not increase as fast as the number of possible combinations.

I would contend that the space of two letter words is pretty sparse. I would think that it's when you get into the three and four letter words that you see maximum saturation...

Of course this is all assuming that, for instance, the english spellings of greek letters aren't counted as words...

Re:Sparse space

[tgv]

Let me check, just for educational purposes.

I can only check Dutch for the moment. It has the following distribution:

1 letter 26 words 100% coverage
2 letters 150 words 22% coverage
3 letters 1774 words 10% coverage
4 letters 6028 words 1% coverage
5 letters 10698 words 0.09% coverage
6 letters 18188 words 0.006% coverage

The one letter coverage is an artefact of the dictionary (CELEX), but there you are.

Re:Sparse space

[tgv]

One of the posters pointed out larger magical squares in Dutch, and I've written another program just for the heck of it, and now it does find 6x6 and 7x7 solutions, even using relatively common words. From the 23 7x7 solutions, the one with most frequent words it found (in just 3 minutes, computers have become a lot faster) was:

b e s l i s t
e n t e n t e
s t a r t e r
l e r a r e n
i n t r e d e
s t e e d s e
t e r n e e r

Without compounding, it does not produce an 8x8 square. Lowering the frequency threshold to the hapax level takes very, very long. I'll post the result when and if the program finds one...

Forget English...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to see a ten-by-ten block with Internet acronyms. Or ASCII art.

o_O
_~_
O_o

That is a valid word...

[Anonymous Coward]

Just use Windows for a while...

A more efficient algorithm

[Paul Crowley]

Using a dictionary

(1) Calculate all the possibilities for the first five words
(2) Calculate all the possibilities for the last five words
(3) Look for a compatible pair

You can filter the possibilities down quite a lot before you start match-finding. And you can do this recursively to a certain extent.

Re:A more efficient algorithm

[johann909]

Why don't you post the code then dickhead? The algorithm's time complexity is likely exponential, otherwise you'd think someone would come up with a solution vastly better than yours.

'Do it recursively to a certain extent'? Fresh out of a first year data structures course, no doubt. Stop wasting peoples' time with your elementary understanding of anything even remotely beneficial to the human race, you stupid, stupid person.

10 Letter Words

[sugapablo]

Well, if anyone wants a good place to start, here's a URL with a big long list of 10 letter words:
http://aaron.doosh.net/lexicon/10LetterWords.html

Re:10 Letter Words

[thewils]

Dammit, they omitted nonesevent!

Re:10 Letter Words

[Virtex]

Hmmm... not too bad, 20302 words, but I found an even longer list using the dictionary file on my Linux box:

grep "^..........$" /usr/share/dict/words | tr "[a-z]" "[A-Z]" | sort -u

I get 30814 words doing it that way.

Re:10 Letter Words

[Anonymous Coward]

Klingon words don't count.

cruel

[plopez]

Tossing something in front of an audience with a larger than normal percentage of people with some sort of OCD. What were you thinking? I for one am getting tired of having to quit my jobs, drop out of school and deal with relationship breakups while i try to be the first to solve yet another stupid puzzzle... :)

Language?

[Transcendent]

Wouldn't you have to solve it in ancient greek since any new language could just make up words to fit?

English solutiosn

[houghi]

Some English solutions are given How abut a GREEK solution in ancient greek? Just make a list of all 10 letter words and have a program a go at it. The worst that can happen is that it will be proven that there is no solution.
Do the same for all other languages as well.

Re:English solutiosn

[Anonymous Coward]

But if the computer solves it, will it be immortal or you?

I know you're joking, but...

[p3d0]

That doesn't work. Try it.

Re:I know you're joking, but...

[Dun Malg]

That doesn't work. Try it.

SATOR SATOR
AREPO AREPO
TENET TENET
OPERA OPERA
ROTAS ROTAS

SATOR SATOR
AREPO AREPO
TENET TENET
OPERA OPERA
ROTAS ROTAS

I don't speak german and subsequently couldn't find any german example puzzles, but presuming you found four 5x5 puzzles with combinable words, how does this not work? I mean, sure it might be said to fail due to the compound word rule, but it does seem to simply combine the words quite neatly.

Re:I know you're joking, but...

[mikiN]

Since plurals of words seem to be permitted in a solution, all you have to do is find a 5 letter solution in a language that can form plurals by repeating a word. Malay or Japanese will do nicely.
Problem solved.

Re:I know you're joking, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know what Malay is, but won't you have a hard time finding enough japanese words that consist of 10 symbols? Or were you going to cheat and westernize it?

Mod parent up

[cryptochrome]

Since slashdot has stopped giving me comment points for some reason.

It's a simple enough solution - if you have a word with no meaning, just find one for it. Problem solved, the neologistical way!

Re:Mod parent up

[jstoner]

Nonesevent is a perfectly cromulent word!

Re:Mod parent up

[pAnkRat]

like: Qwyjibo"
According to "The Simpsons," a qwyjibo is a fat, dumb, balding North American ape with no chin. They're very dangerous when angered. The only way to stop them is by throwing a pork chop in the other direction. This word is very usefull while playing scrabble too.

Re:Mod parent up

[qwijibo]

I believe the original Simpsons spelling was "Kwyjibo".

Orangutang

[frovingslosh]

So what's the problem with Orangutang? It seems like a perfectly valid word to use in such a "puzzle" to me.

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

[Scarblac]

Is "orangutang" the correct spelling in English? The original Malay is "orang utan".

Re:Orangutang

[frovingslosh]

Orangutan - without the trailing G, seems to be the most accepted spelling, but there are enough cases of Orangutang as a spelling that I take it to be an alternate spelling that has come into wide use (Google gets about 125,000 hits). It's certainly not the only case of a word that has more than one recognized English spelling.

Re:Orangutang

[CastrTroy]

You can't use human stupidity as an argument. Just because a lot people think that's how you spell orangutan, doesn't mean that's how you spell it. It's like saying you have proof that go exists, just because people believe him.

Re:Orangutang

[Dachannien]

When "u" (meaning "you") gets in the dictionary, I'll accept "orangutang" in the solution.

Of course, that will also be the day I shoot myself in the head.

Re:Orangutang

[arodland]

Go exists! I've played it!

Re:Orangutang

[BlackMagi]

There is no such word as Orangutang, that's why. The word is Orangutan. It comes from Indonesian / Malay, meaning man of the forest (I think it was forest). "Orang" means person, and utan means forest (or whatever it means). Cheers, -BM

Re:Orangutang

[Bloater]

Given the recent trend of the Oxford dictionary of modern English to accurately describe the usage of words (whether they have only one letter or more). I suspect that could happen in the next edition. However I would like to see two dictionaries produced, the standard one, and the dictionary of contracted spelling. When reading typed communications, "u" meaning "you" is becoming very common, and a dictionary *should* describe the meaning, otherwise how do you know what the person was trying to say?

Re:Orangutang

[Frumious Wombat]

My Oxford American Dictionary claims that "Orangutan" "Orangutang" and "Orangoutang" are all acceptable spellings.

The OED (compact edition), (the full OED, but you need a special magnifier to read it), says "Orangutan" or "Orangoutang", with the first being more correct.

Dr. Zaius, we salute you.

Re:Orangutang

[rob_squared]

My dear friend, that is how english works.

I fully expect to see the word cromulent in the dictionary before I die.

Re:Orangutang

[JakartaDean]

Well, I can tell you that this word is one of only two that came to English from Malay / Indonesian. (The other is amok, as in run amok.) The Indonesian root is actually two words, orang hutan which means jungle person. If anyone is interested...

Re:Orangutang

[PhilHibbs]

Wiktionary doesn't list it as an alternate spelling:

Alternative spellings

        * orang utan
        * orang-utan
        * orangoutan
        * orangoutang

Bastards

[shutdown -p now]

Of course, the Times article doesn't report the proposed ten-letter solution (they show a five-letter one)

Looks like they want to keep that immortality all to themselves!

lameness filter: justified!

[Anonymous Coward]

is this a first?

Squares are fun.

[Kaenneth]

Now do it with a Cube.

ON - NO
NO - ON

net - ewe - ten
ewe - wow - ewe
ten - ewe - net ...

Then a hypercube...

Re:Squares are fun.

[geordieboy]

Well done for coming up with the 3^3 example. Nice

A solution was already published a while ago...

[someone1234]

It was the words 'A PATERNOSTER O' written in a cross shape.
(A/O as in alpha to omega)

Re:A solution was already published a while ago...

[Burb]

I don't think that's strictly speaking a solution to the puzzle, but I'm very suprised that original article didn't mention the PATERNOSTER re-arrangement. Although somewhat contentious, it does raise the possiblity that the ROTAS... grid was an early Christian symbol, perhaps rather like the fish.

Some code to play with

[bort27]

Here's a dumb little perl script I slapped together this morning. You can use it to find these puzzles using words from a dictionary file. If you find anything good, please post it here. (You might want to randomize the order of your dictionary file first, otherwise you're just testing the same word combinations that everyone else has already tried).

Yes, it's bad code, in a language poorly suited for the task. And really inefficient. Probably has bugs, too. Blow me. I was bored and wanted something fast.

Have fun,
bort.

(Slashdot's lameness filter won't let me post code. Grab it from here.)

Re:Some code to play with

[Wildclaw]

Here is some recursive c# code. It will take a while to run though. On my computer it takes a couple of seconds per word, using the 20000 word dictionary linked to elsewhere in this article thread.

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;

class AcrosticSolver
{

    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
        AcrosticFinder(0);
    }

    const int PuzzleSize = 10;

    static Dictionary dictionary = new Dictionary("Dictionary.txt",PuzzleSize);
    static string[] currentSolution = new string[PuzzleSize];

    static void PrintSolution(int depth)
    {
        for (int i = 0; i < depth; i++)
            Console.WriteLine(currentSolution[i]);
        Console.ReadLine();
    }

    static void AcrosticFinder(int depth)
    {
        if (depth == 1) //Progress report
            Console.WriteLine(currentSolution[0]);

        if (depth == PuzzleSize) //Print solution
            PrintSolution(depth);
        else
        {
            char[] wordStart = new char[depth];
            for (int i = 0; i < depth; i++)
                wordStart[i] = currentSolution[i][depth];

            foreach (string possibleWord in dictionary.WordsThatBeginWith(new string(wordStart)))
            {
                currentSolution[depth] = possibleWord;
                AcrosticFinder(depth + 1);
            }
        }
    }
}

class Dictionary
{
    List<String> dictionary = new List<string>();

    public Dictionary(string dictionaryFile,int wordLength)
    {
        using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(dictionaryFile))
        {
            while (sr.Peek() != -1)
                foreach (string word in sr.ReadLine().Split(' '))
                    if (word.Length == wordLength)
                        dictionary.Add(word);
        }
        dictionary.Sort();
    }

    public IEnumerable<string> WordsThatBeginWith(string s)
    {
        int index = dictionary.BinarySearch(s);
        if (index < 0)
            index = -index - 1;
        while (index < dictionary.Count && dictionary[index].StartsWith(s))
            yield return dictionary[index++];
    }
}

Re:Some code to play with

[m_hemaly]

Hey that's a first time the lameness filter proves itself! Who wants the whole code here? Go LF!

Re:Some code to play with

[Anonymous Coward]

Did yours find anything? I came up with pretty much the same algorythm, and never got depth > 7 using the 20k word list from the earlier post.

Homework

[jefu]

I've assigned finding such wordsquare puzzles a few times as a programming problem. Its a pretty easy recursion problem.

On a similar note, Will Shortz, on the NPR Sunday morning show asked a few weeks back for word squares (but without the symmetry) but where instead of each cell containing letters, it contains the symbols for the chemical elements. Someday that or a variant of it could well be another good homework assignment/programming contest problem.

Re:Homework

[retiarius]

hmm ... word jazz combinatorics & chemical symbols --
reminds me of the playful "Lehrer" ordering of the element
symbols, v.i.z. the "video iPod sample" demonstration at:

http://homepage.mac.com/retiarius

Extra credit homework (the kind Prof. Lehrer would have
assigned at U. C. Santa Cruz): find the mathematical "fixed point"
element of both the atomic number and Lehrer ordering.

more info

[bst82551]

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archive s/002679.html

Brian

Quick Search reveals

[Anonymous Coward]

Ted's orignal post

http://72.14.203.104/search?q=cache:djxJxps91g8J:g ames.groups.yahoo.com/group/wordgame-programmers/m essage/15+nonesevent&hl=en

> > DISCUSSING MISSATICAL ORANGUTANG
> > INCANTATOR ISOEMETINE RANGARANGA
> > SCARLATINA SOLSPRINGS ANDOLANDOL
> > CARNITINES SESTUNNELS NGOTANGOTA
> > UNLIKENESS AMPUTIEREN GALANGALAN
> > STATESWREN TERNITRATE URANGUTANG
> > SATINWEAVE ITINERATES TANGATANGA
> > ITINERATES CINERATORS ANDOLANDOL
> > NONESEVENT ANGLETERRE NGOTANGOTA
> > GRASSNESTS LESSNESSES GALANGALAN

Trivial solution for the 10 letter word Puzzle

[Glonoinha]

Doing the 10 letter word problem is totally simple : add "nonesevent" to the dictionary.

http://www.answers.com/nonesevent
Nonesevent (nôns-E-vent') pronunciation
noun
1. This is the word that Ted Clarke, 79, a British engineer invented to force his solution to the 10 letter acrostic puzzle to succeed.

Re:Orangutan

[iphayd]

There is no second 'g' on Orangutan. It is a common misspelling.

Immortal my ass

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no evidence whatsoever that the ancient Greeks believed a ten-letter acrostic would grant immortality. If you RTFA it just says that Roger Millington (not an ancient Greek) wrote that the creator would achieve a lifetime of immortality. He's using immortality as a synonym for fame, not for infinite health.

Re:Immortal my ass

[Keith McClary]

Maybe he meant to say: "A lifetime of immorality".

English helps

[jeffsenter]

English has the largest vocabulary of any language hence it is the language to use in solving these puzzles. To solve the puzzle it would seem all one needs is a really large English dictionary file, a program to solve as a couple of posters have mentioned, and a good bit of computing power or a lot of time.

thinking too hard here...

[tempest69]

The easiest way to get this done is via an itterated filter method. You itterate through the thousands of 10 letter words. filter the each word to reduce the possible words left for the next column, and itterate through those. By the fourth column the chances get pretty slim.. So your looking at about a n^2 log N runtime... which isnt quick but it is doable for a reasonable dictionary size. Storm

Re:thinking too hard here...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's exactly what I did today. I found 4 possible combinations for the first 4 words, but after that it's impossible with the /usr/share/dict/words file I use.

Wrong Language

[FJ]

To be a valid solution to the ancient Greeks (and win the immortality prize), shouldn't the solution be using Greek words?

Re:Wrong Language

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it worth it though?

I mean, have you *seen* Greek women?

Greeks?

[Brandybuck]

What the fudge do the ancient greeks have to do with this? Maybe they had problems with a ten letter Greek acrostic, but that has absolutely no bearing on an English acrostic!

Duh

Gimme A GamePark

[HeroreV]

In Korea only old people play with acrostic square puzzles.

Obviously!

[Poromenos1]

If you want infinite health, chat "power overwhelming".

Re:English solutions

[Chubby_C]

maybe the greeks only had nine 10-letter words?

computer solves puzzle, computer gets immortality

[paropaco]

I think you have to do it by hand if you want to get the reward.

A more tractable problem would be to compute the probability
that a solution to the Ten Letter Acrostic Puzzle exists in
a Gauss-distributed, Markov-model language with 1.5 bits
of information per character.

I'm too lazy to do it.

My mistake

[p3d0]

Sorry, I thought you meant 4 different 5x5 solutions.

7 years.

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe he should have left the computer on those 7 years he was working on it instead of turning it off after just one night.

Remind me next time I make a long running search algorithm to make it resumable so I can upgrade the hardware once a year.

Other similar stories

[Anonymous Coward]

Reminds me of the old science fiction story where some monks had to enumerate all permuations of the letters in their word for their deity. They beleived when it was done the universe would end. Cutting to the chase, they bought a computer to speed it up, and after a short time, IIRC, the stars started going out one by one...

Perhaps that's what immortality in your lifetime is.

Re:Other similar stories

[Kredal]

Nah, that was just the King of All Cosmos out on the town for a night... The next day he made his son rebuild all the stars out of clumps of debris lying around the world.

Obvious problem with using programs...

[antifederalist]

Be careful using a computer to solve the problem, obviously the rules of immortality would mean that computer would become immortal, not you. Just think, you'll be cursed with an old box laying around your room forever.

Not that most of the people here don't already have heaps of old hardware laying around.

An Inversion Square

[Vertex Operator]

Mine:

    detasseled
    exercitate
    tectonical
    arthrolite
    scorpionis
    sinoiprocs
    etilorhtra
    lacinotcet
    etaticrexe
    delessated

See:

http://rec-puzzles.org/new/sol.pl/language/english /spelling/sets.of.words/squares

No NES event?

[PromANJ]

NoNESevent? An event seriously lacking Nintendo Entertainment Systems?

That's Easy!

[JoeCommodore]

10 letter word? That's a no-brainer, it's gotta be:

COWBOYNEAL

Re:They Were Right About the Whole Immortality Thi

[megrims]

You took your time getting here.

Clarke's Conjecture

[cagle_.25]

"Given any language resembling English, there must exist a word within that language whose spelling is nonesevent. I have a wonderful proof, which unfortunately cannot fit within the margins..."

Googlewhack

[iopred]

nonsevent nonevent What do you know! (I understand the actual lack of Googlewhackness, seeing as nonsevent is not a dictionary word, but let me have my time).

Is English Valid a Solution?

[LuYu]

The Greeks invented this puzzle and seemed to think it was impossible -- in Greek. I do not see how solving it in English would count for anything.

If one could use any language, why not use Hawaiian or some other Polynesian language. With few vowels and consonants, it should be relatively easy construct one of these things.

Non-Greek solutions should be invalid.

Re:computer solves puzzle, computer gets immortali

[aybiss]

Don't stress your brain. Just consider that with any alphabet being used by being with physical vocal cords or equivalent hardware, there will be an overwhelming majority of 10-letter combinations that are invalid. Thus the probability that there exists a set of words that matches the constraints of the puzzle basically comes down to what we are all talking about - does this word actually exist in the language.

I for one think that if this guy did do the problem by hand he was very clever, whether nones-event is a word or not. The fact is, there just aren't that many 10 letter words, and the constraints on this problem produce a very sparse solution space, as someone already pointed out.

It's nice to see that while we all find the shortest most elegant string of Perl to format your enemies hard-drives someone is working in the opposite direction with far less logical tasks, but coming up with things that amaze us none the less.

Aaron.

Re:They Were Right About the Whole Immortality Thi

[daddyrief]

HAHAHAHAHAHA

Green blackboards and other anomalies

[Paul Crowley]

Green blackboards and other anomalies

Re:Green blackboards and other anomalies

[johann909]

I wonder the comment you made that provoked this response and gave you this idea. dickhead.

A better solution

[mu22le]

I can solve the n letter squre puzzle if you want me to.

I just designed my own language (I'm the only one using it right now but the userbase will grow...) it is defined so that it contains all the words that appears in the n letter square I just randomly generated to answer your question.

(I can also assign them a random meaning if you want me to)

This was Catweazle's magic chant...

[Traf-O-Data-Hater]

...if anyone remembers this late 60s / early 70s UK TV show, that is.

The problem with Orangutang

[devjoe]

The problem with Orangutang (besides its questionable spelling) is that it is not really an example of the type of word the story is referring to. Tautonyms are words that are composed of the same group of letters repeated more than once, like Walla Walla. If you can come up with two more words of this pattern starting with A and L, with the appropriate crossings, you could make a 10x10 square that uses only these three words, repeatedly. If of course you don't already object to the place name with a space in it being used in your square, but this illustrates the idea.

Orangutang is somewhat related to the tautonyms due to the repeated "ang", and it could lead to a square made of words with just this repeated part, and three words crossing the "ang" repeated within the square. A purer form of this challenge expects that all the words will be different, except where the same word appears once reading across and once reading down.

Stolen?

[Ant2]

He may have borrowed this answer from Graham Toal in 1999 who wrote a little ten square program that found this solution and two others.

See http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/wordgame-progr ammers/message/15

What part of this problem isn't trivial?

[Darius Jedburgh]

Pipe your favorite list of 10 letter words to the following C++ program. (A web search on 'scarlatina', 'galangalan' and 'lessnesses' will point you to the one used by the person the story is about.)

This is a brute force search. It's total crap. But it finds all the solutions in a reasinable time even for a dictionary expanded with non-words like nonesevent.

#include
#include
#include
#include
#include

using namespace std;

const int n = 11;

set prefixes;

bool solve(const vector &tableau,int row)
{
        if (row>=9)
        {
        cout "Solution:" endl;
        for (int i = 0; in; ++i)
        {
                cout setw(2) i ". " tableau[i] endl;
        }
        }

Remainder in next post...

Re:What part of this problem isn't trivial?

[Darius Jedburgh]

Here's some more of the code (/.'s lameness filter is lame):

        for (char l = 'a'; l='z'; ++l)
        {

        string temp = tableau[row]+l;
        int len = temp.length();
        string temp2 = tableau[len-1]+l;
        if (prefixes.find(temp)!=prefixes.end() && prefixes.find(temp2)!=prefixes.end())
        {

Re:What part of this problem isn't trivial?

[Darius Jedburgh]

And here is the last part of the code. I'm putting some extra text here to work around the stupid filter that /. has which prevents us from talking about code even though this is a geek web site. Had to delete whitespace too. Anyway, you can just paste these segments of code together and compile with your favorite C++ compiler. It shouldn't take too long to complete on a reasonable CPU.

This code can be speeded up massively. I only wrote it to demonstrate how lame the original /. story is.

vector new_tableau = tableau;
new_tableau[row] = temp;
if (row!=len-1)
{
new_tableau[len-1] += l;
}

if (len>row+1)
{
solve(new_tableau,row+1);
} else
{
solve(new_tableau,0);
}
}
}
}

Cheaters!

[jgoemat]

Come on, 'satinweave' and 'grassnests'? These aren't words are they? They seem to be combinations of words that should be separated. That makes a different interesting puzzle if you can use any combination of words to make up those 10 letters and they don't have to be single words, but that's not the stated puzzle.

Re: They Were Right...

[thoughtlover]

"I solved this puzzle when I was a kid back in 352 A.D."

If that is so, why is your slashdot user number six digits deep?

Re: 8x8

[tgv]

Well, the program has produced several 8x8 magic squares for Dutch. This is one of them:

g e s p r i n t
e x t r a n e i
s t r o s t e n
p r o b e e r t
r a s e e r d e
i n t e r n e n
n e e r d e e d
t i n t e n d e