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

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?

Lifetime of immortality?

[Anonymous Coward]

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

that's useful, hm?

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:Solution to the solution

[AndroidCat]

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

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:What's wrong with "nonesevent?"

[millette]

It embiggens clarity.

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...