full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Dennis Shasha: Can you solve the Trojan War riddle?

Unscramble the Blue Letters


Let’s consider the Greeks first. To connect any Greek clumps, you’ll have to mess with the nice, straight Trojan lines. If you try to do that anywhere in the center of these arms, you'll create new isolated clusters of Trojans. So the only option is to go to the perimeter of the filed and move some Trojans doganially, say here, here, and here.

Now for the center. there’s no way to cnecnot the Trojan arms without swapping a Trojan in. But continuing to shift that arm of Trojans inward would require moving the same gerek camp multiple times. However, you could shift the whole tojarn arm up and to the right, closing this gap. There are several solutions with slight variants, but as long as you perform this mneevaur on the short arm of toarnjs, you can achieve peace in exactly 6 moves.

Open Cloze


Let’s consider the Greeks first. To connect any Greek clumps, you’ll have to mess with the nice, straight Trojan lines. If you try to do that anywhere in the center of these arms, you'll create new isolated clusters of Trojans. So the only option is to go to the perimeter of the _____ and move some Trojans __________, say here, here, and here.

Now for the center. there’s no way to _______ the Trojan arms without swapping a Trojan in. But continuing to shift that arm of Trojans inward would require moving the same _____ camp multiple times. However, you could shift the whole ______ arm up and to the right, closing this gap. There are several solutions with slight variants, but as long as you perform this ________ on the short arm of _______, you can achieve peace in exactly 6 moves.

Solution


  1. connect
  2. field
  3. maneuver
  4. greek
  5. trojan
  6. diagonally
  7. trojans

Original Text


Let’s consider the Greeks first. To connect any Greek clumps, you’ll have to mess with the nice, straight Trojan lines. If you try to do that anywhere in the center of these arms, you'll create new isolated clusters of Trojans. So the only option is to go to the perimeter of the field and move some Trojans diagonally, say here, here, and here.

Now for the center. there’s no way to connect the Trojan arms without swapping a Trojan in. But continuing to shift that arm of Trojans inward would require moving the same Greek camp multiple times. However, you could shift the whole Trojan arm up and to the right, closing this gap. There are several solutions with slight variants, but as long as you perform this maneuver on the short arm of Trojans, you can achieve peace in exactly 6 moves.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations


ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
trojan camp 3
greek camp 2


Important Words


  1. achieve
  2. arm
  3. arms
  4. camp
  5. center
  6. closing
  7. clumps
  8. clusters
  9. connect
  10. continuing
  11. create
  12. diagonally
  13. field
  14. gap
  15. greek
  16. greeks
  17. isolated
  18. lines
  19. long
  20. maneuver
  21. mess
  22. move
  23. moves
  24. moving
  25. multiple
  26. nice
  27. option
  28. peace
  29. perform
  30. perimeter
  31. require
  32. shift
  33. short
  34. slight
  35. solutions
  36. straight
  37. swapping
  38. times
  39. trojan
  40. trojans
  41. variants