Square Roots

Originally posted by The Plumber
You're right about that. Took about 30 minutes, but I found a common everyday 4-letter word: have

Along the way, I found: pi, ave (as in ave maria - yeah, it's a stretch), up, and mix.

Really cool!

I like Have, and mix is also very good as sqrt(mix) = aah

Also interesting that add, have and mix are all verbs.

Did you use a word list and a program? I thought there were two ways to do it:

a) Generate all integer squares up to a certain size, and check whether each one can reverse translate into a word (a bit tricky as some numbers have more than 1 reverse translation)

b) Iterate through all words and check whether each translates into a square (easier to compute but takes a lot more runtime than method a)

Originally posted by iamatiger
Really cool!

I like Have, and mix is also very good as sqrt(mix) = aah

Also interesting that add, have and mix are all verbs.

Did you use a word list and a program? I thought there were two ways to do it:

a) Generate all integer squares up to a certain size, and check whether each one can reverse translate into a word (a bit tricky as some numb ...[text shortened]... her each translates into a square (easier to compute but takes a lot more runtime than method a)

I used a spreadsheet (a little bit of a brute force method, but it worked). Column 1 was the squared number, and column 2 was the letter translation of that number. I did this for 3, 4, and 5 digit numbers. Unfortunately, a straight translation of that type results only in the letters A through I, which did not result in any usable 4 letter words. I then visually scanned down through the words looking for number groups 10 through 26 and seeing what words come up when I make those substitutions. In the case of HAVE, it was HABBE before combining the Bs into a V.

I could probably redo the spreadsheet calc to come up with a system to look for all possible letters, not just A through I, but that would take another 30 minutes or so....🙂