Re: [FWP] Jotto

[Matthew Wickline <listbox@wickline.org>]

Peter Scott wrote:
> What happened to the Jotto project?


refresher (for those less interested, but not entirely
un-interested): the chalange was to come up with an
efficient means of finding five five-letter words which used
up a total of exactly twenty-five unique letters. Some folks
were proposing optimizations based on the assumption that
only *one* five-word set is needed... I personally will be
interested in finding *all* valid sets for a given
dictionary (so that I may then choose the set which uses the
least-obscure words).

so far as I've heard on this list, the verdict is that no
such set exists.

My original approach was off by two significant brain farts:

1) width-first, rather than depth-first (took *very* long)

2) mistakenly forgot about words with 'y' as the only vowel,
and so had incorrectly reduced by dictionary too much.


Also, a number of folks pointed out freely available word
lists which had missed my attention when I built my jotto
dictionary. A sort | uniq -u informed me that I need to add
a few thousand more words to my dictionary.


So, I personally won't be getting around to approaching the
problem again until I incorporate the new words into my
jotto dictionary (a process which shouldn't take much more
effort than typing this mail, but is less interesting, and
therefor comes after other stuff). Due to the tragic (but
probably inevitable) demise of our neighborhood tuit dealer
at the claws of an underground militia of rabbid kangaroo
rats, I am temporarily without access to tuits. (anyone know
a good source?)

http://wickline.org/saog/
now links to my current (without the few thousand new words)
jotto dict, sorted by word commonality (approximately the
order of magnitude of the number of hits altavista found for
that word one particular afternoon). Be aware, if you
attempt to actually play jotto there, there are no
instructions... I'm not yet sufficiently satisfied with the
UI to pretty it up and document it.

-matt



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