puzzles: June 2006 Archives

For this puzzle, we had to make words that were combinations of four letter synomyn of a list of words.

There was a hint on the page that I used. You can figure out which words make up each pair by dragging them on the page until they turn green.

First, I wrote a quick two line shell script to dump the web page from thesaurus.com for each of the words on the list into a separate file (in plain text format). I had to manually enter the four letter chessmen because chessman isn't in the thesaurus.

Next, I got a list of all the eight letter words (there are 39280 of them) from the YAWL list.

Finally, I wrote a TCL script that grabbed all of the four letter synonyms for each word from the files that I downloaded, tries combining them in all possible ways, and printing them out if it found them in the eight letter word list. The script runs in about four seconds on my computer. I sorted the output of the program and manually looked up each word pair (which were already determined by the hint) in the output.

I was able to determine all but three of the answers this way. I didn't find these answers because the following synonyms weren't in the thesaurus:

pome = pear

placed = lain

innate = born

Here's a screen shot of the answers. There's a bug in the puzzle so two of the answers are by the wrong words.

This sure was a confusing puzzle. First I thought the puzzle was a variant of Lights Out. I guess I missed the part where he said it was a "timed maze". I played with this for a while before I got frustrated. So, I read the discussion page for some hints. This page even had a map of the maze, but I still couldn't make the connection with how the arrows move you through the maze. Even after reading the answer to the puzzle, I didn't understand the rules. The answer shows the map and the sequence of steps through the maze, and it had this vague statement: "Movements based on puzzle module. Not map." OK, I thought this was the answer, not another puzzle.

Finally, I studied the source code. You can read it by right clicking in the puzzle and picking "view frame source" with Firefox. Alternatively, you can go to this url and view the source to the page. Finally, I was able to understand the rules, which I will describe below.

The puzzle is to figure out the rules for several variants of minesweeper. Not particularly difficult, but the variants are pretty fun to play.

Don't read any more here if you want to figure it out for yourself:

Standard: standard minesweeper.

Zeroes: standard rules, but clicking on a zero square does not automatically open up the squares around it. All of the following variants include this rule.

Spider: the mines move randomly after every click. They only move horizontally and vertically, and if you click on a square that isn't a mine, it becomes a block for the mines.

Symbol: uses symbols instead of numbers. The symbols change every game, so you can't memorize them from previous games. I just clicked around randomly about 10 times, then I hoped that one of the symbols was a zero and started clicking all around it. After 5-10 tries, this succeeded and I won a game.

Memory: revealed squares are only visible while your mouse is over the square.

Knight: numbers show number of mines that are chess knight's move away from the square.

Ok, this one was a lot more fun for me than the last one. Here's my C program to solve the puzzle:

View Program

Not the prettiest code, I know. But it works, and it's fast. Here's the solution it reports:

View Answer

Here are my answers to the latest Google Puzzle Challenge:

Download file

I figured out eight of the twelve rhymes. Frankly, this puzzle didn't interest me as much as the previous one did, probably because I couldn't write a program to solve it. In the meantime, I also went back and solved a couple more problems at Project Euler on the Maths Challenge website.