Kaidoku #47 & Solving Difficulties
Kaidoku #47 (PDF)Java applet
How do you attack a Kaidoku like today’s? We’ve discussed quite a few ways to solve Kaidokus but I don’t know if any of those methods are applicable today. There’s no obvious Q or E, I don’t see any obvious letter patterns, and I don’t think the vowels are even that inferable. If you manage to solve this one, make sure to tell us how in the comments!
So baseball’s over, which means we get The Simpsons back on Sunday nights, right? Wrong! Why exactly did we get an all-Seth MacFarlane night on Fox last night? Give me my Simpsons! I’m going into withdrawal. Normally I wouldn’t be, as the last few seasons haven’t been all that great, but I really enjoyed this year’s Halloween special, so I’m looking forward to what else they have in store.
Oh, that reminds me, did you figure out Ken Jennings’ question seven this week? See you Thursday.
November 9th, 2009 by
Alex | tags: Kaidoku
Trying the Q at 15 made that 5-letter word seem guessable… from QUEST to QUICK to QUASH to QUOTA… which was all I needed because it gave me the T, the A and the O.
once again i started by guessing the vowels. 4 or 6, 8, 23, 12, and 21, and i was 90% sure of 3=Y (but it could have been S). was fairly comfortable with 8=E, but in any event, once you know which letters are vowels, a Q hunt is pretty easy, so i also found 15=Q and guessed QUOTA based on the vowel-consonant pattern (and the fact that it didn’t end with E).
one thing that really helps in narrowing down vowels is the idea that if there is a double-consonant, there will pretty much always be a vowel right before and right after, unless it’s the middle of a compound word, or a terminal S (e.g. HILLS)*. today, the double-13 gave me 12=vowel, and the double-19 gave me 23=vowel (which was not at all obvious from letter frequency elsewhere in the grid).
*: other exceptions i have found: onomatopoetic words like AARRGHH, BRR, HMM, PSST, PFFT, SHH, and ZZZ; JOHNNY; MARKKA (don’t know this word, but some sort of finnish coin, i’d bet); and BREMSSTRAHLUNG. plus one more that i’m going to put into a kaidoku in the near future, so i won’t spoil it here.
I managed to just jump right in a ACCOUNTANT! I figured 21 was going to be an O or an E, so i looked at consonants for the Cs… that meant 12 was probably a vowel, and with the repeating NTs in there, it all fell into place pretty quickly!