WordWalk Puzzles

https://www.spaghettispeller.com/todays-puzzles/2024-05-17

 At long last I am pleased to announce that the new interactive, dynamic site for Wordwalk 2.0 is now open for Beta testing. You can find it here:   Wordwalk.2.0 Beta This site has many features that improve on the legacy Wordwalk site: User sign up / login available Puzzle creation:  Create your own unique puzzles and challenge others to solve them as quickly as you can! Player leaderboards Puzzle liking / favoriting Following other users Commenting on puzzles User profiles Future planed enhancements: Buy, selling, and trading puzzles using accumulated points as 'currency' Live two-person puzzle competitions Many more languages (coming soon:  Italian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish) Long-term: points conversion to crypto tokens Long-term: Rendering puzzles as NFTs

 See the YouTube Channel:  @Wordwalk-gu3tk for short videos of solutions to daily wordwalk puzzles. https://www.youtube.com/@Wordwalk-gu3tk

WordWalk Puzzles for 2023-01-28 at https://wordwalk.net Yesterday's puzzles: English rootword was "GRADUALLY". German rootword was "ZWEIFLER". Spanish rootword was "DESCUIDA". Kids rootword was "HUMAN". #wordwalkpuzzles   Here's the solution for yesterday's English puzzle: First subword,  "DRUG":  Second and Third subwords, "DAY" and "LAY": After final subword, "GUY":   Just before placing the final letter of the rootword, "GRADUALLY":       Upon completion:   wordwalk.net  

 WordWalk Puzzles for 2023-01-26 at https://wordwalk.net Yesterday's puzzles: English rootword was "CONDITION". German rootword was "ZUCKTET". Spanish rootword was "MORTALES". Kids rootword was "DEPOSIT". #wordwalkpuzzles

In WordWalk 2.0, the registered users will be able to design puzzles and challenge their friends to solve them. Part of the challenge will consist in specifying which subwords will be made known to the friend solving the puzzle and which subwords won't be made known. In this way, the puzzle designer can determine the difficulty of the puzzle beyond the number of rootwords, the number of letters involved, the number of subwords. Unregistered users will be able to choose for themselves from a vast array of puzzles in many languages, but they will not be able to design and build them.

 Announcing the  registration of the domain name spaghettispeller.com which currently points at wordwalk.net . The goal is to set up a separate WordWalk site for kids that uses a spaghetti and meatballs motif. The current GoDaddy cookie cutter site will be converted into a safe site for kids. Adults will be migrated over to a new wordwalk.net site that will have many features that are perhaps not appropriate for younger children.  E.g., it will allow users to register, login, create their own puzzles, share those with other users and compete in contests.  That site is currently under development and will use the Django and React tech stack. Stay tune for more announcements!

 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...

Today's German puzzle is tough, but you can logically eliminate some stuff by just looking at the arrows and the subwords, before even trying to place a subword. Doing that led me to try the subword 'HIER' first. Das heutige deutsche Puzzle ist schwierig, aber Sie können einige Dinge logischerweise eliminieren, indem Sie sich nur die Pfeile und die Teilwörter ansehen, bevor Sie überhaupt versuchen, ein Teilwort zu platzieren. Das führte dazu, dass ich zuerst das Teilwort „HIER“ versuchte.  

  Daily WordWalk Puzzles 9/24/2022: English Spanish German Kids Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy!

The parameters I use in generating the WordWalk puzzles are the following: 1)  The length of the rootword (i.e., the number of letters in the rootword) 2)  The number of subwords to use 3)  The minimum length of each    The goal for setting these parameters is to ensure that the resulting puzzle is not too hard and not too easy. If there are too many subwords, the chances are good that all the letters and all the arrows will already be present in the subwords, thus making the puzzle too hard, because there will be no unused arrows to hint at those used in the rootword.   If the number of subwords is too low, most of the arrows will be used up only by the rootword, making it almost a pure guessing game;  then the game is too hard and not too interesting.   The game is most interesting, I think, when you have to do some logical reasoning by looking at the unused arrows and eliminating some of the possibilities.  The unused arrows prov...

Daily WordWalk Puzzles: English Spanish German Kids Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy!

Daily WordWalk Puzzles: English Spanish German Kids Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy!

  Daily WordWalk Puzzles: English Spanish German Kids Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy!

 One of the subwords is NENNEN, which, as you can see, is formed from just two distinct letters:  N and E.  The rootword is GESESSEN, formed from only three distinct letters. German words are quite capable of being packed into a compact graph!

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: English: https://wordwalk.net/daily-puzzle-english Spanish: https://wordwalk.net/daily-puzzle-spanish German: https://wordwalk.net/daily-puzzle-german Kids (English): https://wordwalk.net/kids-english-1 Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy!

Daily WordWalk Puzzles: English Spanish German Kids Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy!

Currently, WordWalk starts you off with 0 points and then you get 10 points for each correctly placed subword and an extra 100 for the rootword (which also counts a subword so, in fact, you 110 points for the rootword).  So, for a five-subword puzzle you can get a maximum of 160 points. Moving forward (possibly starting tomorrow) the points system will be different.  You will start out with a certain number of points (say, 100, for discussion purposes).  Then you will get 10 points added to your points stash for each new correctly guessed letter and also 10 points for each new correctly guessed arrow.  These points will not be added, however, until after you've completely and successfully placed the subword in the puzzle graph.  Once that is done you will get some extra points (say, 25) for the subword itself and the new points for new letters and arrows that were obtained while placing the subword. If you fail while trying to place a subword, you won't lose rem...

  Daily WordWalk Puzzles: English: https://wordwalk.net/daily-puzzle-english Spanish: https://wordwalk.net/daily-puzzle-spanish German: https://wordwalk.net/daily-puzzle-german Yesterday's words can be found at the website. Enjoy! #wordwalkpuzzles

In mathematical graph theory, a directed graph is a structure consisting of two sets, a set of vertices and a set of edges.  (In WordWalk we sometimes call these nodes and arrows.)   For any given vertex, we can ask how many edges lead into the vertex and how many lead away from the vertex.  These two numbers have special names in graph theory: in-degree of a vertex = number of edges (arrows) pointing toward the vertex out-degree of a vertex = number of edges pointing away from the the vertex.  In WordWalk, knowing these two numbers can help you make intelligent guesses regarding the likelihood of a given unknown node being one letter vs another. For instance, the letter E, is very common, and if you look at all the subwords that contain E followed by another letter that should be approximately one less than the out-degree of that node (one less because it may also happen in the unknown rootword).  Likewise, the number of times E is preceded by some other letter...