a wolf angel is not a good angel

So my mother and I, in an awesomely exciting Friday night plan, decided to do some of the Lewis Carroll puzzles[1] from Linguist, because they’re fun. (We have, in the past, done them on long car rides. Sometimes you think “oh, if I could only get from drape to gnats I would have the solution”, then you finally figure out that path and can’t remember why you thought it would be helpful, which is why paper is useful.

But in any case, we did some of the easy ones which are, indeed, very easy and also boring, then we did the challenger one:

Looking Glass Puzzle 8

FOR EXPERIENCED PUZZLERS! The shortest solution we could find for this puzzle required 15 steps, or 20 by the old rules! [wolfa: old rules means just exchanging letters, no adding or removing]

Transform ONSET to LEARN

After a lot of work, and a fair bit of randomly putting pseudo-maybe-words into the online Scrabble dictionary until we found one that was useful we got through in *10* steps! We have absolutely no idea how to do it with the old rules — anyone who can show me will have my utmost respect. (I am assuming that the answers will show up on LL eventually.)

[1] Rules: go from one word to another through a chain of other English words. You may, at each step, do one of the following: add one letter, remove one letter, change one letter for another. An English word is defined as a word in the Scrabble dictionary, not a proper name.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 21st, 2006 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Linguistics, Games. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.