Tuesday, September 03, 2013

How, umm . . . particular I am

Yes, that's the word: particular. I couldn't possibly mean that increasingly popular adjective that pertains to the "posterior opening of the alimentary canal," which is of course also found in the last four letters of its definition.

There's a puzzle that I do almost every day because it only takes about a minute. The objective is to find four words in a 6x6 letter grid that wind through the grid from each edge to the opposite edge. Acceptable solutions are often not unique; there can be more than one way to wind through the puzzle to make the same word. However, I have found that, when this is the case, there has always been one solution that doesn't reuse any letter in the grid twice. The same letter might occupy adjacent or diagonal spots in the grid that will both allow the formation of a given answer, but one of those spots will be needed for another answer in another direction, for which the other will not work. The puzzle doesn't require that grid letters be used only once, or award extra points for finding the solution that doesn't reuse any of them, but it just seems to me that the best solution is the one that doesn't use any grid letter more than once. Sometimes there are multiple words that could use alternate paths through the grid . . .

Oh, I've spent too much time on this.  Okay.  Okay.

Anal.

No comments:

Post a Comment