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daviddaviddavid · 3 years ago
For anyone that plays Wordle on NYT Games site, there is another anagramming game called Spelling Bee in which the notion of a pangram is featured prominently. Basically, you get a set of letters from which to build anagrams (one privileged letter must appear in all your anagrams). Pangrams are considered to be any anagram which makes use of all the given letters and it will flash the word 'Pangram' on the screen when you get them, to give you a minor nerdy dopamine hit.

I am addicted to the game and get pissed at myself if I don't get to the top scoring tier every day.

EDIT: Removed spoilers for future readers.

SirAllCaps · 3 years ago
If you happen to speak Icelandic (whopping 0.004% chance!), I recently made a clone of this game to learn NextJS: https://skrafl.rkl.is/

2 biggest differences being:

- Unlimited playing requires no registration.

- The answer keys are not just chilling there in the source code.

mh- · 3 years ago
I play that every day. I do my best and once I've given up by the evening time (it resets at midnight Pacific), I go to this site and see how much better I can do with the prefixes. You can tweak the checkboxes to show you more or less, all the way up to revealing the answers. Great site.

https://www.sbsolver.com/nctx/latest

stavros · 3 years ago
Praising the game this much and not posting a link must be some sort of cruel punishment.

https://www.nytimes.com/puzzles/spelling-bee

kmos17 · 3 years ago
Love that game, addicted too! ps. there’s a fourth pangram today you missed :)
daviddaviddavid · 3 years ago
Thanks! I love it so much. The one thing that annoys me is that it rejects anything that it considers to be domain knowledge or some such criteria. For example, today you'd think you could use 'potto', which is a cool animal in the loris family. But nope, Spelling Bee seemingly rejects it because it considers it to be specialized zoological knowledge or something. BS.

EDIT: Removed spoiler.

thenberlin · 3 years ago
Psst, there are actually five.
thenberlin · 3 years ago
Yeah, +1 to Spelling Bee -- that game is great!

That said, this post needs a SPOILER tag.

kmos17 · 3 years ago
has anyone here managed to get all the words after the genius level? What happens then? I just missed 3 yesterday
thenberlin · 3 years ago
When you get them all, it's "Queen Bee." I've only ever gotten it once -- for whatever reason, the puzzle just clicked that day -- but it was extremely satisfying.
photochemsyn · 3 years ago
Inverse pangram challenge? This string is a frequency map of English letter usage in words (relative to the least common, q = 1). How many different sentences can be constructed from it, using all letters once (using say, the scrabble dictionary as the list of acceptable words)?

'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaabbbbbbbbbbbccccccccccccccccccccccccddddddddddddddddddeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeffffffffffggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiijkkkkkkllllllllllllllllllllllllllllmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooopppppppppppppppppqrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrssssssssssssssssssssssssssssssttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttttuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuvvvvvvwwwwwwwxxyyyyyyyyyyzz'

I have a feeling this blows up pretty fast, computationally.

tgv · 3 years ago
> I have a feeling this blows up pretty fast, computationally.

Of course it does, but there's no way to compute the number without checking all combinations. There are hundreds of thousands of English words, and about the only initial filtering you can do is remove words with more than one q. Each partition will contain at least 20 words, so have >20! permutations.

thih9 · 3 years ago
Define sentence. Does it need to have meaning? Do sentences have to follow each other (or can they be unrelated)?
DFHippie · 3 years ago
I wrote a multi-threaded anagram engine some years ago in Rust. It uses dynamic programming to linearize the problem as much as possible. The word list I typically use it with is not comprehensive by any means. I've taken words out, for instance, that would upset people to see in anagrams of their names (not fart, say, but you can imagine the sort of thing). Even with a simple set of word counts the number of anagrams, excluding permutations, of even simple things is vast. I get 6 from my handle here, which itself isn't very promising. A challenging short name like "Elon Musk" (it has a "k"), gives 36 (examples, "sulk omen" and "elk muons"). Things blow up quickly. My own name, including the middle name, has 23 characters, none of them difficult. The program finds 37,277,770, again, not including permutations. So with your character counts I think you're looking at a pretty big number. And you can blow it up further with a bigger, less polite word list.
867-5309 · 3 years ago
>I've taken words out, for instance, that would upset people to see in anagrams of their names

appreciate this. sincerely,

Lana Ginger Shoales-Watts

svat · 3 years ago
In Sanskrit, where poets have endlessly delighted in playing such tricks with language, there are at least a couple of such verses that contain all the consonants in order: one composed in a live performance by a poet who lived 1854–1914, one from the 11th century or earlier (https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/21366).
onnodigcomplex · 3 years ago
It's a fun programming/puzzle challenge. I developed a perfect pangram in Dutch about a teachers bike that is very lightweight and fast, but not so strong

Jufs BMX: hypervlot c.q. zwak ding

bruce343434 · 3 years ago
"C.Q." is an abbreviation that could mean different things depending on the context. It is not a widely recognized or commonly used abbreviation, and its meaning is not immediately clear. Can you provide some more information or context about it?
itcrowd · 3 years ago
It is common in Dutch, short for casu quo (latin).

"A c.q. B" means something like "A or otherwise B" (example translated from Dutch wikipedia page)

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casu_quo

tremon · 3 years ago
In Dutch, c.q. is an abbreviation of the Latin term casu quo, meaning "or instead, alternatively" (lit. in which case). It doesn't really fit here because it suggests that vlot (quick) and zwak (weak) are interchangeable adjectives -- nor does it match the English usage of the same term, where it is used more like a premise/supposition rather than a conjunction.
dmarinus · 3 years ago
Another populair one is: "Lynx c.q. vos prikt bh: dag zwemjuf!"
euroderf · 3 years ago
Nymphs vex, beg quick fjord waltz.

(27 letters, spotted in the classifieds of a free rag in DC back in the 70s or 80s)

sophrocyne · 3 years ago
Out of curiosity, I asked ChatGPT to generate 10 new pangrams.

The list it provided certainly had the feel of some of the more vexing examples of a pangram, but curiously did not contain all 26 letters.

I then asked it to count how many unique letters of the alphabet each contained. It (incorrectly) asserted that each line had all 26 characters.

I’m not surprised, just disappointed.

stolenmerch · 3 years ago
I asked it to produce a perfect pangram, which uses each letter once and only once. It unsurprisingly couldn't do it despite explicit instructions. It did produce several known examples of pangrams using all 26 letters but didn't seem to have "Mr Jock, TV quiz PhD, bags few lynx" memorized.
Synaesthesia · 3 years ago
Thought this was really interesting, the "Thousand character classic"

>In Chinese, the Thousand Character Classic is a 1000-character poem in which each character is used exactly once...

schoen · 3 years ago
Suppose that someone submitted a pull request that remedied a problem in the Coq proof assistant in a somewhat-too-clever way, but it was nonetheless approved by Coq developer Jim Fehrle.

In that case, we might say

  Zany Coq bugfix reviewed (thank Jim, please!)