WORD FOR WORD (TM) v. 2.0 Copyright 1994 by Richard P. Cember; all rights reserved. Patent pending. Your comments and suggestions in regard to WORD FOR WORD are welcome and desired. Please write to Richard Cember, 1415 Dwyce Drive, Austin, Texas 78757; call at 512-451-0636; or send e-mail to Compuserve ID 73322,1770. Hardware requirements: Word for Word will run on any IBM-compatible PC, but a 486 is recommended. Monochrome or color monitors will do, as will black-and-white monitors that display gray scales as a substitute for color. Monochrome monitors will not, however, give you the full benefit of the on-screen color coding (see below) for different classes of words. For processors below the 486, the situation is as follows: A 386 will run the three- and four-letter games very well, but some people may find the five-letter game a little slow. A 286 will run the three-letter game handily, but the five-letter game will definitely run too slowly for comfort, with the four-letter game being somewhere in between. About Word for Word: Word for Word is a game of word puzzles and strategy for two or more human beings. The object of the game is to solve your Word for Word puzzle, while blocking other players from solving theirs. A Word for Word puzzle is a pair of words. A solution to a Word for Word puzzle is a sequence of words, assembled according to certain rules, that links the two puzzle words. The winner is the first player to solve his (or her) Word for Word puzzle, or the last player left after all other players have been completely blocked from a solution to their Word for Word puzzles. The game is played on a computer. About learning to play Word for Word: Word for Word is not complicated but it does involve several ideas that are abstract and may be new to you. For most people the best way to go about learning to play it is: First, read this general description, which is composed of instructions on how to solve Word for Word puzzles and an overview of the strategic aspect of Word for Word. Next, print out and read the formal rules, in the file "rules2.txt", keeping the hard copy of the rules handy for reference later. After that, view the tutorial. The tutorial is a slide show that contains a simple example game, with commentary, to show you how the most important moves are made, and a few examples of other important moves that come up less often. After that you should be ready to play. To solve Word for Word puzzles: Two words with the same number of letters make a Word for Word puzzle. The solution to the puzzle is a sequence of words that connects the first puzzle word to the second puzzle word. Each word in the sequence is related to the word before it in one of two ways: each word is either (1) made up of the same letters in a different order (i.e., is an anagram of the word preceding it), or (2) is identical to the word preceding it, except for the change of a single letter. One Word for Word puzzle may have many different solutions, and different solutions may contain different numbers of steps. Here is a simple example of a three-letter Word for Word puzzle: OPT TIP. One possible solution for the puzzle OPT TIP is: OPT, TOP, TIP. This solution is achieved by first changing OPT to TOP, through rearrangement of the letters of OPT; then changing TOP to TIP, by replacing O with I. A more interesting example is the four-letter puzzle TONE POEM. One solution using four intermediate steps is: tone, pone, pore, port, poet, poem. An alternative, shorter solution, using two intermediate steps is: tone, pone, pome, poem. Many other solutions to TONE POEM exist. Acceptable words are those which are not proper nouns (names of people, places or things, normally capitalized), abbreviations, contractions, hyphenations, or foreign words that have not been absorbed into English. You can solve Word for Word puzzles by purely mental activity; however, for all but the simplest puzzles it is much easier if you use a pencil and paper. If you've never played Word for Word before, it is strongly suggested that you do a few three-letter or four-letter Word for Word puzzles to "get the hang of it" before you play your first game of Word for Word. It may seem a little puzzling at first, but you will get it very quickly! Here are a few practice puzzles; for solutions, see the file solushn2.TXT: 1. red sky 2. fire sale 3. hard rock 4. call home 5. pear tree 6. truck plaza 7. sugar maple (Numbers 6 and 7 are hard ones.) Word networks: The strategic aspect of Word for Word is built around the idea of a word network. Consider all the four-letter words of the English language. Pick two at random--you have a Word for Word puzzle. It turns out that for almost any pair of four-letter words that you pick, you can find a sequence of connecting words that solve the puzzle. In other words, the four-letter words of the English language are nearly all connected in a kind of network. No four-letter word is connected to more than a tiny fraction of the other four-letter words. But once you start using the words as stepping-stones, then nearly all four-letter words are networked together. This also turns out to be true for three- and five-letter words. Now think about the networks of three-, four- and five-letter words. They're big. Most people can only mentally diagram the network in the immediate vicinity of a single word. Even that can be difficult to do thoroughly, since it is often difficult to consistently identify all the words that are connected to a single word. On the other hand, if you know a lot words and are a good speller, you have pretty much all the information you need in your brain, in an implicit form. It's just a question of accessing it and recasting its form so you can use it. This makes for an interesting strategy game. Over view of the strategic aspect of Word for Word: This section is an overview of how Word for Word works as a strategy game to be played in the word network just described. This section does not give a thorough or detailed description--the details are contained in the formal rules. Players sit down together in front of the computer, each with pencil and paper. (A laptop computer is most convenient, as it may easily be placed on a coffee table or a conference table, but a desktop computer will do.) At the beginning of the game, the players decide whether they will play a game of three-, four-, or five-letter words. Each player receives a Word for Word puzzle selected by the computer and shown to all players. While selecting them the computer has verified that each puzzle has a solution. All the players' puzzles have one word in common, while the other word of each player's puzzle is unique to that player. After an opening period, during which players study their own and their opponents' puzzles, moves begin. Players make their moves in turns. With each move, a player either "deletes" a word, "saves" a word, attempts to clinch a victory ("win" or "save-to-win"), or attempts to force a draw ("delete-to-draw"). To understand what saving and deletion of words means, think again about the word network. Deleting a word means removing it from the network. If a word is removed from the network, then it can't be used as a stepping-stone in finding a word sequence that solves a Word for Word puzzle. Saving a word means marking it so that it is thereafter protected against deletion from the network. These are the two basic moves of the game. There are two ways to win the game: (1) If, among the saved words, you can find a solution to your puzzle, then you can announce that fact and clinch a victory using the "win" or "save-to-win" moves. (The saved words that form your solution can have been saved by anyone, not just by you.) (2) In some games, depending on the words involved, you can delete some well-chosen words before they can be saved by other players, to cut off all other players from the possibility of assembling solution sequences from among the saved words, leaving only yourself in the game. Again, depending on the words involved, a player in a two-player game can sometimes force a draw using the "delete-to-draw" move. The delete-to-draw move allows a desperate player in a two-player game to try to cut off both remaining players from the possibility of a solution. The computer guides the game by prompting the players for moves and posting the saved and deleted words. After each deletion the computer determines whether any player has been eliminated because his puzzle no longer has a solution. If any player has been eliminated, the computer announces it and that person retires from the game. Now read the formal rules, in the file "rules2.txt". A note on the composition of the word lists: I put these word lists together from various sources of words, then went through them by hand to eliminate unacceptable words, as well as to remove profanity and ethnic slurs. (Linguistic purists: sorry, but I can't afford to leave that stuff in.) The result should correspond pretty much to a "college" dictionary. The word lists are in ASCII so that you can modify them if you want to, but if you pass this program to someone else please pass only the original word lists. If you find a word that you believe is unacceptable please let me know. A brief history of Word for Word puzzles: The puzzles referred to here as Word for Word puzzles were first invented by Lewis Carroll in 1879. (Carroll was also the author of "Alice in Wonderland" and "Through the Looking Glass"). Carroll called the puzzles "Doublets", and they made their first appearance in the magazine "Vanity Fair" that same year. The puzzles have remained popular ever since their introduction, under many names in addition to "Doublets" ("word ladders", "word golf", etc.). In 1892 Lewis Carroll introduced a modified version of the Doublets puzzle. The Word for Word puzzle is the 1892 version of Doublets. An aside re: Word for Word puzzles: Although Word for Word as a strategic game is much more than just its puzzles, the puzzles themselves are quite a bit of fun, and can even be a minor literary art form. If you find that you like Word for Word and would like to try your hand at solving puzzles all by themselves, you might try the game WORD TREK, published by Rex Games, Inc., San Francisco, California. WORD TREK is a card game (not software) and contains over 200 interesting puzzles written in a style quite different from Lewis Carroll's own.