Published on 2011-05-05 by Mark VandeWettering
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.
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Fun!
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