Doublets, or word ladders, were invented by Lewis Carrol. The goal of the game is to find a chain of other words that link the start and target words, where any steps changes the previous word by just one letter.
Each step should be a reasonably common word, or at least one you would find in the dictionary.
For example, going from GEEKdad to BLOG, you could traverse:
Below is a list of reasonably geek start/target word pairs that might strike a chord with the GeekDad crowd.
We had a large variety of different types of solution this past week, with people using on-line word ladder solvers, writing custom code for string processing, or just breaking out a Scrabble dictionary and scratching their noodle. Here is one set of solutions, below. Please note that several of the ladders had multiple paths, so there were multiple “correct” answers.
STAR >> TREK:
STAR > SEAR > TEAR > TEER > TEEK > TREK
STAR >> WARS:
STAR > SEAR > HEAR > HEAD > HERD > HARD > WARD > WARS
STAR >> GATE:
STAR > SEAR > SEAS > SETS > GETS > GATS > GATE
SPACE >> BALLS:
SPACE > SPARE > STARE > STARS > SEARS > SEALS > SELLS > BELLS > BALLS
Congratulations to Chad Bergeron, winner of the random drawing and the (soon-to-be) proud owner of this week’s $50 ThinkGeek Gift Certificate. Many thanks to everyone that sent in a submission!
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