Sator Square | Hacker News Reader

Sator Square

en.wikipedia.org

50 pointszeristor25 comments

I wrote a quick script a while ago to bruteforce English 5x5 Sator squares using a wordlist, and the only one that makes some limited sense is

  t i m i d
  i r a n i
  m a d a m
  i n a r i
  d i m i t

I.e. "[the] timid Iranian madam that Inari* dimit(=dismissed)".

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inari_%C5%8Ckami

(Of course, when googling for it somebody else had done the exact same thing and found the exact same square before: https://github.com/daniele-rapagnani/sator-squares)

I suppose another interpretation could be that 'Inari Dimit' is the timid Iranian woman, though I find no evidence online supporting that 'Dimit' is an extant surname, let alone a Persian one. On the other hand though, Inari is so timid that it's hardly surprising that there's no sign of her extremely rare surname.

And one in Russian:

   р у ш и м
   у м а м и
   ш а л а ш
   и м а м у
   м и ш у р

No mention of the film Tenet in the Wikipedia article.

A strange random combination of rewatching the Future Sound of London Papua New Guinea music video: https://youtu.be/wfWMv8Y1V5E

And then Patrick (H) Willems a video on the film Tenet:

TENET And A Celebration Of Vibes Movies https://youtu.be/ZStkUxC4iL4

Neurons that fire together, wire together.

Hmm. I see it mentioned several times.

It's in there.

---

British-American director Christopher Nolan's 2020 film Tenet, incorporates all the five of the names from the Sator square:

The main antagonist is named Sator.

The artist who created the forged Goya drawings was named 'Arepo'.

Tenet is the title of the film as well as the secret organization that works to save the world.

The opening scene is set at an opera house.

Sator owns a construction company called 'Rotas'.

Yes, I missed it.

I thought I read through it more thoroughly, it wasn’t at the end where one might expect media references in Wikipedia, and seemingly one has to open each folded section to download the text for a find in page to work.

I saw the Vibes movie video too - and loved it.

And I loved Tenet too - but I did go back and read a lot of explanation about it.

I once spend more time than I want to admit constructing the best possible 10-square in Dutch[1]. There are also some other forms that are fun, like cubes[2], or hypercubes. Or using bigrams. Or hexagonal tiles. And so forth.

Finding solutions for big squares/wordlists in reasonable time is actually not a trivial algorithmic problem. Neither is making good wordlists, I ended up creating what is essentially a Dutch version of the Pile[3] just to collect words. Good fun.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/thenetherlands/comments/zgr61e/ik_h... [2] https://i.redd.it/a61yuistbkm61.png [3] http://gigacorpus.nl/

Relevant username! How much effort did it took you?

I spend months collecting the dataset to create a wordlist. And I also spend 100+ hours just judging squares and words. And eventually also training char-level LLM's to do that job for me. In Dutch you can compound and there is quite an active morphology so it can be really tricky to judge whether a given word is any good.

Since I worked on it on and off, and also did a bunch other related things I'm not sure, but I would be surprised if I spend any less than 1000+ hours on these silly word-games.

Now I know where Terry Pratchett got the name from :D https://wiki.lspace.org/Sator_Square

If you enjoy these, try my word game https://squareword.org

It is a bit like wordle, but every day there is a new 5x5 square of letters to uncover. Unlike the sator square, every word is unique though, for a total of 10 words. It was really fun to come up with the algorithm to discover these squares.

Here is an example square of a few days ago:

  s c a r e
  t i t a n
  a v o i d
  t e n s e
  s t e e d

eons ago I made this list of wikipedia article titles that can be converted into these squares, the hashmarks around the perimeters link to the articles. There are probably many more possible today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Gmaxwell/sandfoo

Wikipedia's new style messes up the rendering, sadly.

Zzzzz?

Don't look at me, I didn't name the articles!

How did you find the articles?

From a local mirror of the database.

Interesting! But the article is a good example of academic overthinking. A lot of theories mentioned in the article would not survive Occam's razor. There is the strong wish that everything ancient was meaningful, when a perfectly fine explanation is that it is a fun play with words. Maybe a very early and slow-traveling meme?

That's the most facile explanation, but it's also the most boring one. It's always easier to say that something doesn't have meaning, function, or design, rather than to say that you don't know what it is.

Occam's razor is one tool in archeological history. But another is that things many people spend resources to reproduce often have value or meaning. It's also more likely when the practice is widespread across geography or time and especially both.

If you're going off of just heuristics there is at least as much pointing to significance than not.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nipson_anomemata_me_monan_opsi...

Related (though not a sator square). A while back I made an implementation of 5x5 word squares, following an example from Knuth: https://row-major.net/articles/2020-05-12-interactive-word-s...

I guess there’s some Sudoku Wordless, Sator game thing in this somewhere.

It looks like a Daily Mini Crossword to me:

https://www.nytimes.com/crosswords/game/mini

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