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

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.

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".

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.

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: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.

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...

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.