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Showing posts with the label WordWalk

Daily Puzzles 2024-05-17

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

Wordwalk Puzzles: 2023-01-27

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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: 1/26/23

 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

Tip for today's German Word 9/29/2022

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 for 9/24/2022

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

Optimal Parameters

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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 Puzzle for 9/18/2022

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

Daily WordWalk Puzzle for 9/16/2022

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

Daily WordWalk Puzzles: 9/14/22

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

The German Language Can Build Long Words from Few Letters

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 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!

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: 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 for 9/12/2022: Including puzzles for kids!

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

Coming Soon: A Change to the WordWalk Points Reward System

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...

WordWalk Puzzle Solving Strategies (Part 4): Indegree and Outdegree of a Graph

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...

A New Feature

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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:

Daily WordWalk Puzzles 9/7/2022

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

WordWalk Puzzle Solving Strategies (Part 3)

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Sometimes none of the subwords begin with the same letter as the rootword. Consider this puzzle:     Here the rootword begins with P, but none of the subwords do.  What to do? You'll have to use intelligent guessing that eliminates possibilities.  Suppose we try for the first subword "ITS".  Since I is a vowel, it will have to go into one of the two diamond shapes.   But which one? Sometimes it is useful to count the number of arrows going into and out of each shape.  The top left diamond has seven such arrows while the right diamond has 6.  Since I is more common than the other vowel, it is more likely that the left one takes the I and the right one the U.  That's the correct guess, and so we now get: Now, where does the T go?  T follows I in at least two of the subwords and I follows T in at least of the subwords.  So, we can expect an arrow coming from the I to the T and vice versa, which mean we can certainly rule out...

Daily WordWalk Puzzles for 9/6/22

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

Daily WordWalk Puzzles 9/5/2022

 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!

Announcing Spanish WordWalk Puzzles!

Just launched this morning: Daily Spanish WordWalk Puzzles