Featured Post

BFRC

I am posting this as a benchmark, not because I think I'm playing very well yet.  The idea would be post a video every month for a ye...

Monday, March 13, 2023

The Two Spelling Bees: A Cognitive Riddle

 I do the Spelling Bee at the NYT; you find as many words, of at least four letters, as possible with a given seven letters, with one letter being obligatory. One word at the very least, will be the pangram, containing all seven letters. Letters can be repeated. 

There is another version of the Spelling Bee (no longer available on line) which you can print out and solve, instead of solving on the computer.  

The mystery is this: whereas the pangram on the on-line version often takes very long to solve (for me), the pangram in the print-out version would often appear to me in a flash, just by me staring for a few seconds at the list of letters. It is though the seeming advantages of the digital version were nullified.  For example, in the digital version  you can scramble the letters, putting them in different order to suggest other possibilities; you can type out the letters quickly in various sequences in order to stumble across words accidentally.  

No comments: