![]() ![]() It has occurred to me that I could write or install a Boggle-solver program which checks all the combinations against an English word list to give me a maximum score, but I’ve never been moved to go to the trouble. Anyway, it’s amazing how, as I spent perhaps an hour with this puzzle, more words start appearing to me as I continue with each set of letters. I did ask ChatGPT about it once, and ChatGPT responded that it wasn’t always possible with sets of letters in particular puzzles, but because it is ChatGPT, I have no way of knowing whether it speaks from knowledge of something it found or whether it’s hallucinating. I tend to do reasonably well at these, often scoring in the top score category, but it’s frustrating that they never tell you what the maximum possible score is, so if I don’t make the top category I have no way of knowing whether it’s because I didn’t try hard enough or see enough patterns or if it just wasn’t possible with that particular set of letters. In the real game they actually are random, but in the newspaper puzzle you are given a bonus assignment to search and find four fruits or six country names or some such, so it’s clear than most of the letters are precomposed to fit the bonus. And that said, once or twice I’ve gotten one or two unscrambles which gave me enough hints to solve the cartoon clue and then go back and solve the other unscrambles.īoggle Brain Busters gives me a 4 x 4 square with pseudo-random letters, where the goal is to find as many words as possible of three or more letters by moving from one letter to an adjacent letter to the next until you spell a word. In fact, if I don’t immediately get the answer to the cartoon clue, I typically never solve it even if I solve the the scrambled words. What makes it interesting is that I will often solve it in reverse: I will immediately get the answer to the cartoon clue and use that knowledge to solve the unscrambles. The Jumble is an interesting case: just in case you’re not familiar with it, you are supposed to unscramble four 5-or-6-letter words, then use circled letters within those words to solve a punny ending to a cartoon clue. ![]() They also have a Sudoku but I’m not into Sudoku so I don’t even touch it. Times daily crossword, along with the Jumble and Boggle Brain Busters. The Daily Journal, of San Mateo County, has one fairly generic crossword as well as the L.A. Lately I’ve discovered some other dailies and weeklies include free crosswords. I get the Ken Kens about 90% of the time, so that meets my definition of a solid challenge. It’s also good exercise to make my rounds to the candidate newspaper boxes, so there’s that. But alas, they are daily no more, and when they went to three times a week, they dropped the New York Times puzzle for some other syndicator that they don’t credit.Īnyway, while the challenge is now finding a paper rather than solving the puzzle, I do enjoy it enough to go try to hunt down the paper and do the puzzle, along with the Ken Ken that comes with it. Believe me, I was really pleased when I started solving Friday or Saturday puzzles. ![]() Thursdays’ puzzles generally had a twist, and it took me a long time to start getting those. It would start out easy on Monday, getting harder and harder as the week progressed. When they were a daily-except-Sunday, they ran the New York Times daily crossword. It’s more fun if I can solve them most of the time but not all the time, so I at least feel there’s a challenge. However, the main problem with their puzzles, is that I can virtually always solve them. So I have to hunt them down, and I’m not always successful that also means I don’t always get to check my answers to see how I did with the previous puzzle. I say “up to” because they aren’t consistent about delivering it to their freebie boxes, and more and more of their boxes are disappearing. I get up to three a week in the local three-times-a-week newspaper The Examiner. Typically if I do solve one, though, I will have covered 98% or more of the squares correctly and frequently 100% of them. Given that crossword puzzles tend to be a mashup of language knowledge and trivia, I consider myself to have solved one if I cover 95% or more of the empty squares correctly. One of the things I enjoy doing is solve crossword puzzles. ![]()
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