Eight Words

		a	b	c	d
	T A A A O R C R B E I D S P D S
e							f
g							h
i							j
k							l
		m	n	o	p

After just 6 button presses return this grid to a position where four words can be read horizontally and four vertically.

Report your button presses and the 8 words found. The "R" button resets the grid.

(In reply to anagramming website by Sing4TheDay)

Thanks for the link to wordsmith.  I put in the 16 letters of the current grid, and asked for four 4-character words.  It returned 32588 lines (which may have included reordering some, but even dividing by 16 there are still over 2000 possible word sets for the current puzzle (without the buttons and permutation rules).  This seems to make puzzles of this description unwieldy, and worse, indeterminant.  There are many uncommon or dialect variants, etc.  To automate solving such a puzzle (I usually only work on numeric or logic puzzles which can be programmed), I would need files which I could integrate with my available computer languages and environment.  Programming a simulation of the buttons would be interesting, but without a lexicon there is then nothing to search.

Posted by ed bottemiller on 2009-03-20 18:44:50