My adviser hired a post-doctoral student recently. He is from Colombia, so we often speak to each other in Spanish. His name is Helber. He is quite friendly.We recently went together to Argonne National Laboratory ( near Chicago ) for a physics “Get-together”. That was all fine and good, and I think my presentation went well. On the car ride back to St. Louis, he taught me a word game, which he attributed to Lewis Carrol.
The object of the game is to turn the word ‘black’ into the word ‘white’ by only changing one letter at a time. However, each time a letter is changed, the resulting set of letters must form an accepted English word. For example, changing the ‘l’ in ‘black’ to ‘n’ is not allowed; but changing the ‘b’ to ‘s’ is allowed. Helber and I were able to do it in 8 steps ( Helber had never done it in English before ). Can you best that?
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Sounds like a very fun game. I’ll have to try it sometime.
black
blank
blink
brink
brine
trine
trite
write
white
This is what I came up with. And I learned a new word in the process: trine, “an aspect of 120° (one third of a circle)” (apparently an astrology term–maybe you’ll know it, Seth!). I’m sure there’s a faster way though…
Hey James, I also started with ‘blank’ and ‘blink’, but the rest of the words are different. I figured out another way to do it as well, but this way also involves 8 steps. Actually, I am not familiar with the word ‘trine’, but I like it.
black
blank
blink
clink
cline
chine
whine
white
Ohhh, you did it in 7! Here the solution that Helber and I came up with:
black
blank
blink
clink
chink
think
thine
whine
white
Hypothetically, the minimum number of steps could be 5, if you can find a way to only change each letter once; but I can’t think of any words that start with ‘bh’, or ‘wl’, so I suspect the minimum is 6 or 7 steps.
Actually the word “bhang” (originally a Hindi word) starts with “bh,” but I still don’t see how it could fit in…