Substitute the red numerals, 0 to 9, with a unique letter to form five 4-letter words which read in the direction of the arrows; the 5 vowels (A,E I, O and U) are to occupy the inner "ring" of the pentagram.

No one specific solution is sought but please attempt to offer words that are in common usage.

(In reply to Tutorials? by brianjn)

Various word-list files are available on the internet. I have a text file of all the words I've culled, and also separate files with just 4-letter, 5-letter, etc. words, available for random access.  In this case I needed only 4-letter words and so used that one file, even though I didn't need random access in this case.  Only 405 of these words had two different vowels in the middle, and so could fit into an internal array. Luckily the combinations quickly narrowed down with each more inner loop due to the restrictions of the puzzle.

I've kept Windows XP so that my QB4.5 will still work as do my Visual Basic 3.0 16-bit apps. These are not just puzzle-solving programs, but also things I use regularly. I don't know what else will fail if I switch to a later Windows. But in any case, unless forced into Windows 7 or later, I don't yet have a need for QB64; I don't know what its limitations are vis-a-vis QB4.5.

Posted by Charlie on 2011-12-29 10:19:43