Daily Archives: 5/4/2011

Word squares…

I like to read the Programming Praxis website. Every post challenges you to write some simple programs to boost your skill, akin to finger exercises for a musical instrument. Today’s challenge was an interesting which intrigued Charles Babbage: creating word squares.

I spent about 10 minutes writing one in Python that worked rather well: here is an early version, which I augmented a bit. Running it against /usr/share/dict/words gave way too many squares, with lots of really uncommon words. I had better luck with The 12dicts word lists, which concentrate on more common words. In particular, I came up with this pair of rather pleasing order 5 squares based upon the words BRAIN WAGON.

B R A I N
R E T R O
A T L A S
I R A T E
N O S E Y
W A G O N
A G A V E
G A T O R
O V O I D
N E R D Y

Fun!