Results tagged “jotto” from The Gameshelf
Jotto puzzles came about while I was working on the AI to play Twisted Jotto. As I was having the computer try to guess the word, I had it output the number of words the secret word could possibly be, since it was picking somehow from that set of words. I found it kind of neat when it got down to only one possible word, and it came to me that I could record the guesses and turn it into a kind of single-player Jotto without the need for a computer (print out a bunch of them and take them on the subway, for instance). In order to make the game not too easy, I restricted it to scores on individual words of 0, 1, or 2 (so no scores of 3, 4, or 5). And because of how I generated the Jotto puzzles, the words are not necessarily in the order that the computer generated them, so an additional challenge could be to order them (knowing that the computer was adhering to Twisted Jotto rules).
At one point, I had thought I would post a Jotto puzzle every day with an annotated solution. The annotated solutions lasted for exactly 5 days before I lost interest, but I did manage to post a Jotto puzzle every day for about 14 months. Here's the first Jotto puzzle I posted:
Ybgf bs mrebf urer, fb guvf fubhyqa'g or gbb onq. Yrg'f fgneg ol ybbxvat ng rnpu jbeq gung qbrfa'g fpber mreb.
fjvzf fpberf 1, ohg jr pna xabpx bhg gur f'f sebz qryyf naq gur z sebz thzzl. Gung yrnirf hf jvgu rvgure j be v.
cvdhr fpberf 1, ohg jr pna xabpx bhg gur r sebz qryyf naq gur h sebz thzzl. Gung yrnirf hf jvgu c, v, be d
jubbc fpberf 2. Hasbeghangryl, vg qbrfa'g funer nal yrggref jvgu gur jbeqf gung fpber 0.
Jr ner yrsg jvgu:
jv=1
cvd=1
jubbc=2
Vs gur jbeq unf na v, gura vg unf ab j (jv=1) naq ab c (cvd=1). Gung tvirf hf ubb=2, juvpu vf rvgure ub be bb. Guvf tvirf hf gjb pbzovangvbaf: vub be vbb.
Vs gur jbeq qbrfa'g unir na v, gura vg unf n j (jv=1) naq rvgure n c be n d (cvd=1). Vs vg'f jc, gura gung gnxrf pner bs jubbc (jubbc=2). Vs vg'f jd, gura jr arrq rvgure na u be na b (jubbc=2). Guvf tvirf hf guerr zber pbzovangvbaf: jc, jdu, be jdb.
Jr abj unir svir cbffvoyr pbzovangvbaf. Fvapr gurer vf ab h (thzzl=0), vg'f hayvxryl gung gurer vf n d, fb jr pna vtaber gubfr pbzovangvbaf. Nyfb, vs vg'f jc, gura gurer jbhyq or ab ibjryf (nyy bs gur ibjryf, vapyhqvat l, ner ryvzvangrq ol jc), fb jr pna vtaber gung sbe abj. Gung yrnirf hf jvgu whfg gjb pbzovangvbaf: vub be vbb.
Abj, jr znxr n yvfg bs gur yrggref gung nera'g va nal bs gur thrffrf. Gurfr (cyhf cbffvoyr ercrgvgvbaf bs yrggref jr'ir nyernql thrffrq) ner jung jr arrq gb svyy bhg gur jbeq:
swxaikm
Gur a whzcf bhg evtug njnl, fvapr vg vf gur zbfg pbzzba yrggre yrsg. vbba ybbxf cebzvfvat, naq, vaqrrq, vg tvirf gur nafjre: bavba.
Here are a couple of other Jotto puzzles to whet your appetite:
Want more Jotto puzzles? I present to you all of the Jotto puzzles I created back when I was first working on these. If there's interest, I can generate arbitrarily many more. These are just text files, and you can print them out as they are on normal-sized paper and use the blank space to the right as your working space for solving. There are files with puzzles of five, six, seven, and eight letters.
5puzzles.out
5puzzles2.out
6puzzles.out
7puzzles.out
8puzzles.out
8puzzles2.out
Share and enjoy.
At one point, I had thought I would post a Jotto puzzle every day with an annotated solution. The annotated solutions lasted for exactly 5 days before I lost interest, but I did manage to post a Jotto puzzle every day for about 14 months. Here's the first Jotto puzzle I posted:
guess score ----- ----- dells 0 swims 1 gummy 0 bract 0 pique 1 whoop 2And here's the rot-13 annotated solution:
Ybgf bs mrebf urer, fb guvf fubhyqa'g or gbb onq. Yrg'f fgneg ol ybbxvat ng rnpu jbeq gung qbrfa'g fpber mreb.
fjvzf fpberf 1, ohg jr pna xabpx bhg gur f'f sebz qryyf naq gur z sebz thzzl. Gung yrnirf hf jvgu rvgure j be v.
cvdhr fpberf 1, ohg jr pna xabpx bhg gur r sebz qryyf naq gur h sebz thzzl. Gung yrnirf hf jvgu c, v, be d
jubbc fpberf 2. Hasbeghangryl, vg qbrfa'g funer nal yrggref jvgu gur jbeqf gung fpber 0.
Jr ner yrsg jvgu:
jv=1
cvd=1
jubbc=2
Vs gur jbeq unf na v, gura vg unf ab j (jv=1) naq ab c (cvd=1). Gung tvirf hf ubb=2, juvpu vf rvgure ub be bb. Guvf tvirf hf gjb pbzovangvbaf: vub be vbb.
Vs gur jbeq qbrfa'g unir na v, gura vg unf n j (jv=1) naq rvgure n c be n d (cvd=1). Vs vg'f jc, gura gung gnxrf pner bs jubbc (jubbc=2). Vs vg'f jd, gura jr arrq rvgure na u be na b (jubbc=2). Guvf tvirf hf guerr zber pbzovangvbaf: jc, jdu, be jdb.
Jr abj unir svir cbffvoyr pbzovangvbaf. Fvapr gurer vf ab h (thzzl=0), vg'f hayvxryl gung gurer vf n d, fb jr pna vtaber gubfr pbzovangvbaf. Nyfb, vs vg'f jc, gura gurer jbhyq or ab ibjryf (nyy bs gur ibjryf, vapyhqvat l, ner ryvzvangrq ol jc), fb jr pna vtaber gung sbe abj. Gung yrnirf hf jvgu whfg gjb pbzovangvbaf: vub be vbb.
Abj, jr znxr n yvfg bs gur yrggref gung nera'g va nal bs gur thrffrf. Gurfr (cyhf cbffvoyr ercrgvgvbaf bs yrggref jr'ir nyernql thrffrq) ner jung jr arrq gb svyy bhg gur jbeq:
swxaikm
Gur a whzcf bhg evtug njnl, fvapr vg vf gur zbfg pbzzba yrggre yrsg. vbba ybbxf cebzvfvat, naq, vaqrrq, vg tvirf gur nafjre: bavba.
Here are a couple of other Jotto puzzles to whet your appetite:
guess score ----- ----- conus 2 trods 0 showy 2 ponty 2 benis 1 yugas 1 honda 2 guess score ----- ----- downs 2 yoops 1 ergot 1 vista 1 allod 1 lenes 1 hurds 1 prawn 2 union 1 guess score ----- ----- ratus 2 gnarl 2 mimeo 0 capul 1 lurry 2 hardy 1 churn 2I've also done ones with custom words, including the word "jotto" itself and my five-letter username elsewhere (which happens to be a legal five-letter word). I'm happy to do a custom one for anyone else, and I can do it for any number of letters (not sure how well 3 would work, but anything larger than that should work, although I haven't tested how easy it might be to generate/solve ones longer than eight letters).
Want more Jotto puzzles? I present to you all of the Jotto puzzles I created back when I was first working on these. If there's interest, I can generate arbitrarily many more. These are just text files, and you can print them out as they are on normal-sized paper and use the blank space to the right as your working space for solving. There are files with puzzles of five, six, seven, and eight letters.
5puzzles.out
5puzzles2.out
6puzzles.out
7puzzles.out
8puzzles.out
8puzzles2.out
Share and enjoy.
I talked about Jotto and one of its variants last month. JottoZendo is another Jotto variant that I came up with. The idea for it came to me in a dream (there was a time when I was doing a lot of Jotto programming and playing), but I don't remember anything about the dream.
Zendo is an Icehouse game invented by Kory Heath. As Kory says:
For my computer implementation, the computer randomly picks a lock and randomly picks a key from one of the 13 most common letters (etaonisrhdlcm), which I thought would help make the game not too difficult. Keeping the difficulty level down is also the reason I restricted the rule to be of the form "only score $lock if $key is present", rather than allowing for many different kinds of rules (e.g., "only score $lock if it is in its correct position", "only score $lock if it is in position X", "only score $lock if it comes before $key", "only score $lock if $key starts the guess", or even crazier ones like "only score $lock1 if $key1 is present; only score $lock2 if $key2 is present; if $lock1 and $lock2 are both present, score 3" or "$lock1, $lock2, and $lock3 score 1, and $lock4 and $lock5 score 2").
So, here is a sample game:
Here's a game where I decided to go back to my old way of playing Jotto, where I just changed one letter at a time (in the beginning of the game, anyway):
Here are two more sample games. In both of these, the lock was present early on, but the key never showed up with the lock. Also notice that I started off following Twisted Jotto rules (which is, if you recall, simply the way I play normally now) and then abandoned them when I was having problems coming up with words to guess that fit the Twisted Jotto rules. The rule in the first game was "score d if m", and the rule in the second game was "score a if o".
Zendo is an Icehouse game invented by Kory Heath. As Kory says:
Zendo is a game of inductive logic in which the Master creates a rule and the Students attempt to discover it by building and studying arrangements of plastic pyramid-shaped pieces (known as "Icehouse pieces"). The first student to state the rule correctly wins.There are many ways that Jotto and Zendo could be combined, but I picked a pretty simple one, one that gives just a flavor of Zendo rather trying to implement Zendo with five-letter words. JottoZendo is played just like regular Jotto, except that along with picking a secret five-letter word, the scorer (I guess I'll use the words "scorer" and "guesser" for the two roles in a Jotto game) also picks one of the letters in that secret word. For the duration of the game, this letter is only scored if another letter (let's call it the "key", which I guess makes the letter in the secret word the "lock") is also present in the word. The key may or may not be a letter in the secret word. The game is won when the secret word is guessed. (I suppose for a little extra challenge you could also require that the rule be guessed, but this doesn't seem like it would add much.)
For my computer implementation, the computer randomly picks a lock and randomly picks a key from one of the 13 most common letters (etaonisrhdlcm), which I thought would help make the game not too difficult. Keeping the difficulty level down is also the reason I restricted the rule to be of the form "only score $lock if $key is present", rather than allowing for many different kinds of rules (e.g., "only score $lock if it is in its correct position", "only score $lock if it is in position X", "only score $lock if it comes before $key", "only score $lock if $key starts the guess", or even crazier ones like "only score $lock1 if $key1 is present; only score $lock2 if $key2 is present; if $lock1 and $lock2 are both present, score 3" or "$lock1, $lock2, and $lock3 score 1, and $lock4 and $lock5 score 2").
So, here is a sample game:
guess score ----- ----- overt 1 lazes 2 cable 3 flame 2 caked 4 dance 4 cadet 4 cared 4 decal 4 raced 4 cadre 4 cedar 4 paced 4 caped 4 decay 4 arced 4 cades 4 faced 4 maced 4 decaf 4 caved XMan, that game sucked. The rule was "score e if a is present". Notice how I pretty quickly got to a score of 4. At that point, however, I didn't have any way of knowing if the fifth letter might be the lock, in which case the missing letter might be one I had already guessed and dismissed, possibly even in a word that scored a 4 (note that any anagram of the secret word is going to score 4, unless the key is also in the secret word (which happened to be the case here)). I'm a bit worried that this type of situation might happen regularly in JottoZendo games, which could lead to some rather long games. I don't know if it helped or hurt that the key was also in the secret word.
Here's a game where I decided to go back to my old way of playing Jotto, where I just changed one letter at a time (in the beginning of the game, anyway):
guess score ----- ----- sport 1 spore 1 pours 1 store 1 parts 2 pants 3 banks 3 clans 3 hangs 3 damns 3 swans 4 sands 4 spans XThe rule was "score p if d is present". It turned out I had the p from the beginning but didn't know it, since p never showed up with a d. I'm not sure if I just got lucky with this one or if changing one letter at a time in the beginning helped me narrow in on things faster.
Here are two more sample games. In both of these, the lock was present early on, but the key never showed up with the lock. Also notice that I started off following Twisted Jotto rules (which is, if you recall, simply the way I play normally now) and then abandoned them when I was having problems coming up with words to guess that fit the Twisted Jotto rules. The rule in the first game was "score d if m", and the rule in the second game was "score a if o".
guess score ----- ----- place 0 ovoid 2 broom 2 shoot 3 nooks 3 goofs 3 swoon 4 woofs 4 woosh 4 wools 4 swoop 4 woods X guess score ----- ----- laugh 1 level 0 fruit 2 fatty 0 round 2 rumps 3 rumor 2 rusks 3 gurus 3 surer 3 auras XI've only ever played JottoZendo against the computer, and to my knowledge, no one else has ever played it (there probably don't exist too many games that only one person has played). If I get motivated (and encouraged), I may end up making these games available. There are already plenty of implementations of regular Jotto around online, but I think X-Jotto and JottoZendo might be fun to make available. And of course, anyone reading this is free to implement them or to simply play them with friends on paper. If you do, I would be happy to hear about it.
I became obsessed with Jotto when I learned it from some friends in high school (the friends had learned it, for some reason, in Latin class). Jotto is a word game where two players try to guess each other's secret five-letter word. Each guess must be a valid five-letter word, and a guess is scored by reporting the number of letters in common with the secret word. Unlike Mastermind, order is not important (I plan to address secret words with anagrams in a later post). Here is a sample (naive) game, from the perspective of one player:
That's how I played the game for quite a while. At some point, in an effort to make the game more of a challenge, I came up with a variant that I call Twisted Jotto. In Twisted Jotto, each guess you make must be a possible secret word based on the information from the previous guesses. So in the above game, "spore" would not have been a legal guess in Twisted Jotto, since its score against "sport" is 4, not 2. Here is a sample Twisted Jotto game (borrowed from my article in The Perl Review):
It didn't take me long to realize that Twisted Jotto enabled me to make fewer guesses to find the secret word (even if it took more time to come up with a guess). Twisted Jotto then became just the smart way to play Jotto (although the smart player will abandon it in certain situations, for example, when you know four letters and there are a number of possibilities for the fifth).
Another variant of Jotto is to play with different word lengths. I first did this with six-letter words, and my friend Matt named this Count Rugen (the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride). Using six-letter words is certainly more challenging than using five-letter words. Here's a sample game (using Twisted Jotto rules, of course):
And of course one could keep increasing the number of letters, making the guesses harder and harder to find. That is maybe more challenging but is starting to seem more like work than fun. Enter another variant. My friend Debby came up with this one, called X-Jotto. In X-Jotto, the number of letters in the secret word is unknown. I decided that the word length could be from three to eight letters. So, even if the word has eight letters, you can test letters by guessing a three-letter word. Here are some sample X-Jotto games (for sanity's sake, I didn't use the Twisted Jotto rules):
Now, if you study the above games closely, you will see that I started out the same way in all three games, guessing three or four words that have no letters in common (flack, trudges, and hominy for the first game and flank, trudges, chimp, and boxy for the other games). This gives a minimum number of letters that the secret word must have, which makes it a bit easier to think about (and led me to a five-guess win in the third game).
Now, while this might make it easier to think about, is it a good strategy for minimizing the number of guesses? To find out, I had my Jotto program play itself at X-Jotto 100 times with two different guessing strategies. The first strategy is simply Twisted Jotto rules: it eliminates any words that don't score correctly, and then it randomly picks one of the remaining words. The second strategy is the same except that the first four guesses are always the set of four words from the second and third games above.
The first strategy found the word in an average of 9.15 guesses (standard deviation = 1.97), and the second strategy found the word in an average of 9.76 guesses (standard deviation = 1.95). Now, I don't know much about statistics, and it is a small sample size, but my gut tells me that the purely random method is going to be better overall. However, that less-than-one-guess difference might make it worthwhile to use a starting set of words, so that you can more easily get your brain around the search space. More tests are in order (the first one being trying the three-word start from the first game above).
I know this blog isn't really about word games, but I thought I'd put this up and see if anyone else has the kind of interest in word games that I do. Unless I get smacked down for posting about this, I'll do a few more Jotto-related posts, and possibly some related to other word games. If nothing else, it's made me pick up my Perl Jotto programs again, which has been a lot of fun.
guess score ----- ----- sport 2 spore 3 spare 2 pared 2 scare 2 scape 1 joker 3 loner 3 grove 4 gorge 3 hover 4 mover X
That's how I played the game for quite a while. At some point, in an effort to make the game more of a challenge, I came up with a variant that I call Twisted Jotto. In Twisted Jotto, each guess you make must be a possible secret word based on the information from the previous guesses. So in the above game, "spore" would not have been a legal guess in Twisted Jotto, since its score against "sport" is 4, not 2. Here is a sample Twisted Jotto game (borrowed from my article in The Perl Review):
guess score ----- ----- trios 1 false 3 slang 2 swell 2 passe 3 abase 2 pleat 4 paler 5 pearl X
It didn't take me long to realize that Twisted Jotto enabled me to make fewer guesses to find the secret word (even if it took more time to come up with a guess). Twisted Jotto then became just the smart way to play Jotto (although the smart player will abandon it in certain situations, for example, when you know four letters and there are a number of possibilities for the fifth).
Another variant of Jotto is to play with different word lengths. I first did this with six-letter words, and my friend Matt named this Count Rugen (the six-fingered man in The Princess Bride). Using six-letter words is certainly more challenging than using five-letter words. Here's a sample game (using Twisted Jotto rules, of course):
guess score ----- ----- clamps 1 boughs 1 trines 3 sevens 3 defies 3 bindle 4 belier 2 ceding 5 inched X
And of course one could keep increasing the number of letters, making the guesses harder and harder to find. That is maybe more challenging but is starting to seem more like work than fun. Enter another variant. My friend Debby came up with this one, called X-Jotto. In X-Jotto, the number of letters in the secret word is unknown. I decided that the word length could be from three to eight letters. So, even if the word has eight letters, you can test letters by guessing a three-letter word. Here are some sample X-Jotto games (for sanity's sake, I didn't use the Twisted Jotto rules):
guess score ----- ----- flack 1 trudges 3 hominy 0 wares 3 pared 2 frees 2 berserk 4 levers 6 revels X guess score ----- ----- flank 0 trudges 4 chimp 1 boxy 1 crusty 2 brides 4 showered 6 reshod 6 horsed X guess score ----- ----- flank 0 trudges 1 chimp 1 boxy 0 pew X
Now, if you study the above games closely, you will see that I started out the same way in all three games, guessing three or four words that have no letters in common (flack, trudges, and hominy for the first game and flank, trudges, chimp, and boxy for the other games). This gives a minimum number of letters that the secret word must have, which makes it a bit easier to think about (and led me to a five-guess win in the third game).
Now, while this might make it easier to think about, is it a good strategy for minimizing the number of guesses? To find out, I had my Jotto program play itself at X-Jotto 100 times with two different guessing strategies. The first strategy is simply Twisted Jotto rules: it eliminates any words that don't score correctly, and then it randomly picks one of the remaining words. The second strategy is the same except that the first four guesses are always the set of four words from the second and third games above.
The first strategy found the word in an average of 9.15 guesses (standard deviation = 1.97), and the second strategy found the word in an average of 9.76 guesses (standard deviation = 1.95). Now, I don't know much about statistics, and it is a small sample size, but my gut tells me that the purely random method is going to be better overall. However, that less-than-one-guess difference might make it worthwhile to use a starting set of words, so that you can more easily get your brain around the search space. More tests are in order (the first one being trying the three-word start from the first game above).
I know this blog isn't really about word games, but I thought I'd put this up and see if anyone else has the kind of interest in word games that I do. Unless I get smacked down for posting about this, I'll do a few more Jotto-related posts, and possibly some related to other word games. If nothing else, it's made me pick up my Perl Jotto programs again, which has been a lot of fun.
