Wednesday, November 3, 2010
Peachy Jumble
Yesterday's Jumble (word puzzle on the comics page) had string that I unscrambled to CHEAP. When I went to solve the phrase at the end, I was two letters off. A little backtracking led me to conclude that the correct solution was not CHEAP, but PEACH. First time I've run across this situation. I kind of half expected it could happen, after all, how many five letter words are there? I wonder how many times I have unscrambled a word, just by luck, correctly, when there was an incorrect anagram lurking just around the corner.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
2 comments:
The unicity distance in English is 7 letters; it is the 50% probability level of getting a unique decode of some encrypted text; a number closely related to what you are looking for, Charles.
Great, just what I need, another word to learn about. And it doesn't have just one meaning, it has two, although the phrase "unicity distance" identifies the meaning we want. The new Sherlock Holmes series on BBC had an episode that used some cryptography: pairs of chinese pictographs for numbers spray painted on walls, which picked numbers out of a book. The only question was what book?
Good to hear from you. How you are enjoying yourself.
Post a Comment