All this week, I've been trying to chip away at Allen R. Morgan's "Twice Removed" puzzle on page 50 of the August 5, 2012 New York Times Magazine. The rules:
For each word below, add the same pair of letters *twice*
to complete a longer word. For example, if you were given
MOTE, you would add ON twice to make MONOTONE.
After a few days, I'd found just four of the 24 words. Pathetic. After moping for a bit, I tried brute-forcing the answers. The strategy was simple, but radically different from how you or I would try solving the puzzle by hand. The steps:
- Get a big list of English words.