Thursday, November 3, 2011

11/3/2011

mike's word: wont
joon's word: hootenanny

Discuss.

5 comments:

  1. I guessed all around Mike's word because I figured it was too simple and "easy" to be the right one. I guess the lesson here is not to reject any possible word--it doesn't have to be an "interesting" word to be the right one!

    ReplyDelete
  2. I wonder how many solvers have actually been to a hootenanny? I thought of it instead of hoot, but rejected it as 'too dated,' so there's a lesson there, too. Ah, The Sixties; the 'Hootenanny Hoot' I went to was on the Emory University campus, but it felt weird to be sitting in auditorium seats--didn't fit the ambiance.

    ReplyDelete
  3. lane, i think wont is an interesting word. the word is unlikely to be something as mundane as "hand" or "mad" but i don't think wont falls into that category at all.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Maybe not. I use it fairly regularly, though I'm probably in the minority there. Anyway, I was probably overthinking in my puzzle solving.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Daniel Kahneman's new book ("Thinking, Fast and Slow") has this interesting piece:
    "...In one of our studies we asked participants to answer a simple question about words in a typical English text:
    Consider the letter K.
    Is K more likely to appear as the first letter in a word OR as the third letter?

    As any Scrabble player knows, it is much easier to come up with words that begin with a particular letter than to find words that have the same letter in the third position. This is true for every letter of the alphabet. We therefore expected respondents to exaggerate the frequency of letters appearing in the first position--even those letters (such as K, L, N, R, V) which in fact occur more frequently in the third position.....
    --- --- ---

    So maybe this is a cosmically crazy thought, but how different would the game be if the higher/lower ranking were based on the sort that omitted the first letter of each word? Maybe that would complicate the coding too much. But it would certainly challenge the way we may be navigating vocabulary space in our heads. It might make the game much too hard. But I think it's a very interesting question...

    ReplyDelete