Tangoing with a Martin Gardner Word Game

A central theme amongst many of them was that the problem involved some sort of game - such as chess, name cards, and word games. To call these problems intriguing would be an understatement - there's an uncrossed knight's tour problem, a variant of chess where the first person to check the opponent's king wins, a variant of the urn problem, and, of course, the topic of this blog - a word game. A few years ago, Holt devised the following word game. If you knew the target word and compared it letter by letter with any word on the even list, you would find that an even number of letters in each probe would match letters at the same positions in the target word; words on the odd list would match the target word in an odd number of positions. Having determined both the first and last letters, we then look at "Ten." As it is an odd word and "e" is the middle letter, we can conclude that "e" is also the central letter in the target word. This can easily be turned into an NYT-esque word game, where the computer thinks of a three-letter dictionary word at random, and our task is to guess the word while the computer gives us odd/even hints. Take the odd probe word from Step 1 and generate variations of this word by changing one letter at a time while keeping the other two letters constant.