I'm a non-coding lurker here, but the only thing that ever motivated me to write my own program was to solve the newspaper anagram puzzle, "Jumble", faster than my wife. I wrote it in Basic, then re-wrote it in assembly language, I forget when. Then in Fortran while home bound during the first summer of the pandemic - to atone for my past sin of neglecting to learn Fortran when I had a chance in the late 1960's.
About thirty years ago I had an account on a computer system that had a Boggle game, and I got tired of losing to it. So I wrote a program (in C!) which, when run, would search the grid and print out a list of all the words it found. Since I was using a bigger dictionary than the Boggle game itself, I found a lot more words. Ha ha, take that!
I proudly boasted to a friend about my winning Boggle solver and they said it was the pettiest thing they had ever heard of.
I did the same thing!
I stumbled upon an old ‘Al Zimmerman’ programming contest that involved creating wordsearch grids with the most words possible. I had a technique in mind, wrote it in BASIC. Then realized that was too slow. So I tried it in Java (which I’d heard was easy… it wasn’t… st least not to me). And then finally wrote it in C++, a language I found perfect in all respects. I actually ranked near the top in that contest, and I’ve been programming ever since. Ironically, I write programs to make puzzle books and I even have a Jumble knock-off on Amazon (sans cartoons… can’t draw worth a damn.)
With respect, the moment you mentioned "re-wrote it in assembly language"...you stopped being a non-coder! :-) By the way, very cool use of technolgoy for somewhat everyday things (solving puzzles).
I did similar for a newspaper puzzle unscrambler, pushing to rewrite it in lower level languages (PowerShell then C# then Rust) and changing algorithm (from sort letters, to precompute lookup hashtable of sorted letters, to multiply prime numbers one for each alphabet letter to drop the overhead of sorting, to lookup hash of those, to sorting the integer results into an array to do a binary search through and jump to the matching offset in an answers array and inlining those in the code) until it was near enough instant.
... and I don't use it, because unjumbling the word myself is satisfying, but typing the letters into a computer and getting the answer isn't.
Given that he added that middle "initial" himself and he didn't actually have a middle name, I like thinking that he added it precisely to make that joke work. Probably not true, but I still like it.
That was pretty good for a one-word anagram. Back in the 1990s I wrote a program that generated anagrams for longer phrases and I was surprised to find these prescient ones:
Saddam Hussein = He damns Saudis
Charles Manson = Slasher con man
David Letterman = Dead mitral vent
Mary Jo Kopechne = My joke chaperon *
Benito Mussolini = So, I bout Leninism
Lee Harvey Oswald = Oe, why ever Dallas? *
* "Chaperon" is a valid alternate spelling of "chaperone"
Things like that explain how some people get obsessed with numerology. Except, I find the anagrams like you and the previous commenter mentioned to be more impressive than anything numerologists produce.
Some of those are almost creepy in how they make so much sense.
The most remarkable name anagram for me remains that of 1990s UK conservative Health Secretary and government minister Virginia Bottomley (now Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone), whose name rearranges to “I’m an evil Tory bigot”.
In terms of this ‘chunk scoring’ method this scores very high (15 I think?), which definitely confirms its value as a way of rating anagram quality.
> I guess I’ll be known for nothing more than being the man who realized that “Spiro Agnew” was “grow a penis.” Gore Vidal said, “It could be ‘grow a spine,’ too, but yours is better.”
Boy, they're really socking it to that Spiro Agnew guy again.
How many generated anagrams do you have to skim through to find these gems? Was the program written in a way that limits the output to phrases that make at least some sense?
It had features for things like limiting output to anagrams that contain a maximum number of words, or words with a minimum length, so you wouldn't have to slog through every permutation. Usually the most interesting ones had the fewest words. But "interesting" is subjective so if you really wanted to find juicy ones you would have to spend more time combing through the results by hand.
Ted Kennedy, her "chaperon," was male, so it works perfectly. Although I don't think the difference between the spellings is a gender thing, but rather a British/American thing.
Similar to this, he produces a standard form for each word, but breaks each letter into letter pieces or 'atoms' which gives much more freedom for moving between words.
Definitely give it a watch. If you are not familiar with Tom7's videos, he has a hilarious whimsical style while also bringing to life completely out there ideas with some brilliant technical skill.
I thought integrals / triangles was much more interesting, despite the shorter length. None of the other long pairs have any meaningful relationship, except for maybe excitation / intoxicate
Megachiropterans are fruit bats. They are really stinking adorable, especially when compared to smaller insect-eating bats, and for that reason are sometimes called flying foxes. In short, they make good subjects for cinematographers.
Readit News
misrelation / orientalism; superintended / unpredestined; incorporate / procreation (don't mind if i do!); predators / teardrops (a cause and effect); counteridea / reeducation (a bit synonymous); streamlined / derailments (quite opposite!); truculent / unclutter; colonialist / oscillation; renavigate / vegetarian; persistent / prettiness; paternoster / penetrators (hmm); obscurantist / subtractions; nectarines / transience (a story of ripeness); definability / identifiably; indiscreet / iridescent; excitation / intoxicate; discounter / reductions (how logical!)
One small suggestion I have: add a point for pairs with different starting letters, and another point for pairs with different ending letters.
I proudly boasted to a friend about my winning Boggle solver and they said it was the pettiest thing they had ever heard of.
... and I don't use it, because unjumbling the word myself is satisfying, but typing the letters into a computer and getting the answer isn't.
how does that work?
Saddam Hussein = He damns Saudis
Charles Manson = Slasher con man
David Letterman = Dead mitral vent
Mary Jo Kopechne = My joke chaperon *
Benito Mussolini = So, I bout Leninism
Lee Harvey Oswald = Oe, why ever Dallas? *
* "Chaperon" is a valid alternate spelling of "chaperone"
** Yes, "oe" is a word
I also like the mathematically correct
ELEVEN PLUS TWO = TWELVE PLUS ONE
especially because it's also an numeric anagram
11 + 2 = 12 + 1
Some of those are almost creepy in how they make so much sense.
Goedel's incompleteness theorem fans would be drooling all over this
In terms of this ‘chunk scoring’ method this scores very high (15 I think?), which definitely confirms its value as a way of rating anagram quality.
> I guess I’ll be known for nothing more than being the man who realized that “Spiro Agnew” was “grow a penis.” Gore Vidal said, “It could be ‘grow a spine,’ too, but yours is better.”
Boy, they're really socking it to that Spiro Agnew guy again.
Atlantic casino resort spa / Carter assassination plot
You can find the documentation, a Win32 executable, and the source code here: https://www.kmoser.com/anagrams/
Similar to this, he produces a standard form for each word, but breaks each letter into letter pieces or 'atoms' which gives much more freedom for moving between words.
Definitely give it a watch. If you are not familiar with Tom7's videos, he has a hilarious whimsical style while also bringing to life completely out there ideas with some brilliant technical skill.
https://ad1c.us/infobahn.htm
> 7 admirer married > 7 admires sidearm