Square Theory
aaronson.org
aaronson.org
What makes it fun is trying to reverse-engineer the original rhyme from the clues. It's like solving a little logic puzzle. It's easy to come up with new puzzles, but cracking them can be surprisingly tricky. Still, the structure gives just enough to keep it solvable most of the time.
1. Somewhat described here https://bestlifeonline.com/jeopardy-rhyme-time-opera-version... It's actually quite difficult to find a description of the category many of us are already familiar with.
Homophones and proper nouns are considered acceptable.
So for example: (Fox, Lone, Crossed)
The answer would be: Star
Star Fox - a well known rail shooter originally on the SNES
Lone Starr - the only man who would dare give a raspberry to Dark Helmet
Star Crossed - a Shakespearean reference to two people whose relationship is doomedThere have been occasions where the answer was not the intended one, but it still fits all three and that's considered fair game!
Nice whistle mate! (I like your suit, from whistle and flute).
It’s fun to figure them out.
Here are some examples with answers in rot13:
Strange, this reunion = Zntvp gur Tngurevat
Boat pork refuge = Nexunz Nflyhz
Donkeybutt taverns gospel = Nffnffvaf Perrq
Caring for the elderly = QBGN
Belongs to me create = Zvarpensg
Superclock = Birejngpu
Top Stories = Ncrk Yrtraqf
Skyline no morning = Ubevmba Mreb Qnja
According to this 1941 Life Magazine issue, teenage girls in Atlanta were making up rhyming pairs like this at the time under the name "stinky pinky". https://archive.org/details/Life-1941-01-27-Vol-10-No-4/mode... Webster's Dictionary from the 60s has the game listed under that name, https://archive.org/details/webstersthirdnew0000phil_l0b1/mo... and that name also seems to continue to today, e.g. by the radio show Loveline.
It's possible I found this decades ago and the origin of how I learned this game was lost to time :)
i have five clean references to "as a mason jar" so my collection is fairly complete ;-)
note: ripgrep 4.079s wall; ag (silversearcher) 5.916s wall; grep 6.940s wall
Sorry about that.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/8785/brain-strain
I made a proof-of-concept daily game: https://awfulwaffle.jonabrams.com/
"Why was the scarecrow given an award?"
"He was out standing in his field."
The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguistic coincidence.
Wikipedia attributes the joke to an 1847 article, which is phrased in a way that clearly isn't intended to have some deeper meaning: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_did_the_chicken_cross_the_...
To make the square you'd have to do something where the context of "the other side" means past life into death. e.g., "Why did the spiritualist put his ear towards the road? To hear from the other side."
I don’t know how to make the chicken crossing the road use this meaning, but … well, there it is.
You might have taken this as a hint?
"Waiting to be seen" having slightly different meaning with respect to hospitals and invisible ink.
The success of that initiative remains to be seen.
Is what you reminded me of. Technically first it was "fuckin' Mitch!" Because Hedburg sprayed reappearing disappearing ink on someone's shirt.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Both ways to parse it are grammatically sound:
(Fruit) (flies) (like a banana)
(Fruit flies) (like) (a banana)
To decide which meaning was likely intended, the listener needs to make a value judgement about the speaker, based on detailed knowledge of the everyday world.
No, in speech we seem to get by without spaces, and that's in every language that I'm aware of, but then we also don't have commas, parentheses, apostrophes, or capital letters. Somehow, intonation and emphasis must replace these (or rather, writing encodes our speech somehow) but I'm not sure how they map exactly. Question marks indicate a rising tone for example, that's about the extent of what I know
As a child learning to write, I had a phase where I put whole sentences together because that made sense to me as the next step after we learned to write letters together to form words. It took quite some convincing before I believed that adults don't secretly do this and they're only telling us to add space because they think we're not ready for the next step. I guess I innately thought words belong together and we only add a pause between sentences
There is one speech pattern where spaces can be heard though. Like in English, when you enunciate very clearly because the person isn't understanding (for example, if their English is very poor, or when you're shouting across a long distance), similarly in germanic languages I'd add time between each word, and nearly none if it's a compound word. Like how you'd pause between "get" and "out" if you want to make yourself extremely well understood, but afaik not/barely between "handy" and "man" or "quag" and "mire" because the parts haven't the same meaning, or aren't understood at all anymore, in isolation
Now I'm curious actually, might English native speakers also add less time between compound nouns/adjectives in this speech mode? So not like "quag" and "mire" but something that's commonly written apart, like "bottle cap". Do they (you?) identify and indicate things that form one concept also by separating them less, and only the written encoding is different between the languages, or do they feel like the words are fundamentally separate things in the same way that "go" and "home" are separate parts of speech?
I think the hyphen removal follows the typical speech pattern in which the syllables are rushed together just like the syllables of other words, but I'm not sure.
It begs one to consider the possibility of little “time flies” snacking on arrows. Which I guess completes the square?
Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence?wprov=sfl...
[0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008290415597
If you enjoy this feeling, I think you would like my word game https://spaceword.org. The goal is to arrange 21 letters in a square that is as tight as possible. No one has achieved a "perfect" pattern yet, but people are very close, often leaving only 3 spaces blank!
To get a "perfect" pattern you'd need to find three 7 letter words that can stack on rows adjacent to each other to form a 3 letter word in each column. Such arrangements do exist, for example:
o p e r a t e
a r r o w e d
r e s e n d s
But there are 12,000x more ways to rearrange 21 tiles within an 8x3 grid, and the word choices are more forgiving as well (if you draw 7 letters from the etaoin frequency distribution, those 7 letters in order are much more likely to form a 3 letter word followed by a 4 letter word than they are to form a 7 letter word). Pretty much every puzzle should have at least some solutions fitting within an 8x3.
Additional note: 3 blank spaces is the best non-perfect arrangement, since the grid is only 10 tiles wide. One blank space could only be achieved by a single 23-letter-long word, and two blank spaces could only be achieved by a 10 letter word next to an 11 letter word, and an 11 letter word would not fit inside the 10x10 grid.
My other game, https://squareword.org focuses exclusively on perfect 5x5 squares, but here the goal is to uncover it wordle-style rather than arranging it from scratch. There are surprisingly few combinations that have ten unique, common words in a 5x5 letter square!
Like any golf, you start with the smallest square possible and increase it with each level. You get less points for how perfect the the square is.
Some "daily" games call this kind of generated puzzle a "practice" mode. But whenever I encounter a daily game, I go straight for that mode, which is what most games would just present as the game itself.
> Jet black/Jet Blue ... catnap/dognap
My favorite examples are how prepositions can change the meanings of idioms. For example, to be "down for" something and "down with" something mean the same thing, but to be "down on" something means the opposite. (And going down to X means something very, very different from going down on X. That last example is also interesting from a geeky HN point of view because the preposition imposes a type constraint on the binding of X, which is why I had to use "X" instead of "something" :-)
Yes. In this case the text is in the ALT tag, which would help if browsers exposed it.
That's much less true than it used to be! I don't know what device you're using, but on my iPhone I can seamlessly copy the text from that image.
Doesn’t this work?
Down with lunch!
(Breakfast food is yummier).
But I think that the "Diagonal" that the author suggests for the connection between "Donkey" and "Elephant" and "Party" isn't quite correct. The key is that both the Donkey and the Elephant are a "Party Animal." You can't ignore the "Animal" part, it describes them: they are each the animal that represents their party, the "party animal."
I'm not sure the correct way to represent this in "Square Theory," but it's not just linking "Party" to the animal in question.
The "Grubhub" square fits some other alternatives: "Grubclub", "Bitesite", or "Eatmeet" (but eww).
I bet that you could fit the "clever bits" of writing of quite a few literary classics into more complex shapes. Especially when it's the ons that only people who really like literary classics like. Like, say, a story with five main characters who all turn out to be connected in one way like how one might create a five-pointed star with one piece of string and five push-pins, and in a completely different unrelated way like a pentagon made by the same arrangement of push-pins.
OT: Going by the url, link here on HN and slightly adjacenty vibe I got to the bottom and signature before realizing this wasn't Shtetl-Optimized finally made mobile-friendly.
1. Cryptic crosswords (1920s) - the only interesting crosswords.
2. "Metaphors We Live By" Lakoff & Johnson (1980), or perhaps just "Roget's Thesaurus" (1805) long before that (synonyms, antonyms), and obviously homonyms.
3. A little bit of Category Theory, but not too much, just the amount that occurs to you after 1 & 2. An alternative entry point might be knowledge graphs (1990s).
I got there and thought "Category theory", and, lo, that's the next paragraph.
> Let’s talk about Scrabble, one of the seven most important games [link to review of Seven Games book] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/books/review/seven-games-...
Seven Games was mentioned in another HN discussion last week, by 'danvk talking about his Boggle solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084022
HN hasn't yet taken an interest in that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
Which attractive terrorists?
Read until sleepy. Sleep until ready.
https://www.thaifoodnearmenyc.com/
There was a local food-truck operator named "Phở King" and eventually they established a storefront ... well, I see one closed, and another opened up. Formerly known as "Phở King Kitchen" and now there's the "Phở King Eggroll" place.
Fred Armisen did an SNL bit about this, too.
Not far from me, there is a ghost kitchen cluster. It's tucked away in a commercially-zoned neigborhood, and it serves all the food delivery services. Apparently, you can walk in too. I only accidentally patronized them once, when they had some great larb on offer. I think the report says there's 15 different menus and "virtual kitchens" in the building, just turning out food-to-go.
The stricter of the squares seem to be a homomorphism. But the "looser" ones which don't "preserve structure" after the transformation but "find a new structure" are some of the more interesting ones.
I’d argue you could bind them tighter by giving the corners strong relationships to each other as well.
We find these sorts of dense correlations pleasing because it’s the natural way we discover meaning. Even though in this case the meaning is fairly superficial.
SATOR
AREPO
TENET
OPERA
ROTAS
(Very easy to commit to memory too since most of the letters are right there in the name!)
>Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!