Changes to Puzzle Rules and Presentation 9/13/2022

Made some changes to WordWalk puzzles:
1) Now displaying number of letters in hidden rootword.
2) The bubble of the rootword's first letter is thickened.
3) The points system has changed (read about it at the site).
4) You get 4 guesses instead of 3 before you lose.
5) Main puzzles are based on 7-letter rootwords and 5 subwords of minimum 3 letters each.
6) Kids puzzles are based on 5-lettr rootwords and 5 subwords of minimum of 2 letters each.
Daily WordWalk Puzzles:
Yesterday's words can be found at the website.
Enjoy!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

New WordWalk Format

Image
 Yesterday we implemented a new version of WordWalk , eliminating the drag-and-drop approach in favor of point-and-click.   We have also placed all the candidate letters in a table row above the graph, so now there are no longer any floating letters that have to be dragged and dropped. We have also included the maximum possible score (which varies with each puzzle) so that you can compare your score against the best possible. To help understand how this works, let take a look at the kid's puzzle step by step. Here's the initial set up. Note that there 395 points possible. First we try to spell out "BEER" by selecting the B in the table: Then we select the B in the graph, which gets highlighted in yellow, and the yellow/red coloring for the B in the table reverts to white/black: Since the B is a correct first letter for either of the subwords, it remains yellow/black until the subword is completed.  Since we are trying for "BEER", the next letter is E: Placin...
Read more

A New Feature

Image
WordWalk puzzles now highlight the letter that starts the hidden rootword by thickening the border of the shape that depicts it. This was due to discovering that it is easy to forget which letter was first after correctly placing the subwords in the graph. E.g.,in today's English puzzle, we have: The first letter of the rootword is H, as indicated by the ovals with the thick borders.  Then, after embedding, e.g., the subword "HALL" into the puzzle, we can still tell which letter is the first letter of the rootword:
Read more

WordWalk Puzzles and Graph Theory

Image
WordWalk puzzles are word games based on the directed graphs inherent in the spelling of words (in any language that supports alphabetical spelling).  The idea is that the sequence of letters in each word implies a unique directed graph that is unique for the given word.  Letters are assigned unique vertices in the graph and the relation 'is-followed-by' between letters is reflected in a directed graph edge. For example, the word 'jump' would be represented as the graph <V,E> where V={j,u,m,p} and E={(j,u),(u,m),(m,p)}. Pictorially, we might have: (The special diamond shape for the letter 'u' is used in official WordWalk puzzles to indicate that this letter is a vowel.) This directed graph contains only a single path and is perhaps not very interesting because each letter occurs exactly once.  But if a letter occurs more than once, an arrow is drawn from the letter just before the repeat back to the original node for that latter.  E.g.,in the word 'el...
Read more