Re: [FWP] Jotto puzzle: first five guesses

[Matthew Wickline <listbox@wickline.org>]

rjk@linguist.dartmouth.edu, 1999_07_22:
> I have a multi-player telnet version of Jotto.
:
> could display it if people are interested.


I'm interested :)


> words are not allowed to have repeated letters; 


aww... that's half the fun! Words like 'guage' are
especially annoying o nail down.


> The ENABLE word list, which contains some very rare words,
> has fewer than 9,000 five letter words. 


I'll have to look that list up... Do you by any chance
recall where you found it?


> Where did you come up with over 10,000 of them?


I spent one afternoon searching for on-line dictionaries and
word lists. I ended up with over 15,000 unique words, from
about ten major sources. I applied a few heuristics after
looking at the results from each to remove the majority of
the proper nouns, brining it to just over 10000. I'd bet
that the majority of the extra odd-ball words are from two
sources with especially plentiful strange words: a medical
and a legal dictionary.


> Now I'll obviously have to put some effort into an actual 
> Perl solution, because of the inspiration of your 
> challenge!


ain't it funny how thorny tasks turn into fun challenges
when working in perl? :)


> Hmm, I don't have that word in my list.  What word is it?


I'm forgetting right now, and have to head into the office
pretty soon, or I'd find it for you. It was a rare word (of
course) and wasn't defined in my primary word-source. I
think it might have been a medical word (just taking a WAG).
I'll post a url for the list of words below.


> If you're going to leave in all the 'u' no 'q' words, then 
> you should leave in all the two vowel words to go with 
> words like 'crypt' and 'lynch'.


D'oh!!!!

I can't believe I forgot that! Now I'll be even *more*
interested in the ideas everyone comes up with. Well, I
guess I'd have to re-do it anyways if that word list you
mentioned added any more words.


> Could you put your dictionary on the web and post the URL?  
> Otherwise we won't be able to have a basis for comparison
> of our own code.


http://wickline.org/saog/stats.txt

col1 is the words (list is sorted alphabetically by word)

col2 is whether or not the word is defined at dict.org. Note
that some common words are not defined there because the
defintion appears under the root forms... 'harps' has no
definition for example.

col3 is how many hits altavista found for that word on one
particular afternoon. Eventually I plan to use the order of
magnatude of that number to allow folks to restrict their
target word to more common words.

-matt



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