A Problem Squared - 038 = Fldxt in Wordle and Improv Tact Hurdle

Episode Date: July 18, 2022

In this episode...   * Can you guess 5 unique words with unique letters in Wordle?   * How do you get out of your head and into the scene in improv?   * And any other Cheesness.   Here's the dictionary text file Matt started with for his problem. It contains 370,000 words: https://github.com/dwyl/english-words   A huge thank you to everyone who helped with Bec's dinglett.   Alex Holland at the Free Association - this is where Bec did her improv course, and you can find details about that here: https://thefreeassociation.co.uk.   David Reed, his play Guy Fawkes will be showing at the York Theatre from October:https://www.yorktheatreroyal.co.uk/show/guy-fawkes/.   Also to Rachel Pariss, you can find her on 'The Latenight Mash' with Nish Kumar or here on Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/33emshys   And the brilliant Josie Lawrence. You can find more about her on twitter too: https://tinyurl.com/JosieLawrence   As always, if you've got a problem or a solution, hit us up on aproblemsquared.com.   And if you want want even more from A Problem Squared (and who doesn't) find us on Twitter and Instagram.

In 2019, a crack comedy unit was sent to prison by a military court for a mime they didn't commit to. The pair promptly escaped from their maximum maturity charade to the analogous lower bound. Today, still wanted by the government, they survive as soldiers of solution. If you have a problem, if Google cannot help, and if you subscribe to them, maybe you can ask a problem squared. The Hannibal of this show is Matt Parker

because he is a natural leader, has an unflappable demeanourour and loves it when a LAN comes together. Hey, that I do, I do. While I am the BA Baracus because I like milk, dislike flying and I pity the fool who chooses to do a podcast with me. Also the BA stands for Beck Awesome Hill. You're not wrong. Yeah, I'm not.

You do pity a lot of fools. Yeah. I also have never watched the A-Team. Really? Yeah, yeah. Oh, I've watched a lot of the A-Team. And it was one of those things where I've tried to rhyme or at least hit the same syllables in the words that I replaced

from the original. I don't know how much people will appreciate that, but there it is. I was quite proud of analogous lower bound instead of Los Angeles underground. That's very nice. Very, very nice. And much like the A-Team, often our podcast ends in a massive car crash, but we just saunter out. We're fine.

Dust ourselves off. And we're always falling into boxes. Fall into boxes a lot. Jump out of windows into more boxes. Yeah. We should bring out an annual. Do you remember when TV shows had an annual? I do.

A little activity book. We should do that. Problem squared annual. Problem squared annual. Oh, my goodness. There we go. There's some merch ideas. It's a solid intro and you've got merch ideas.

Yeah, yeah. We need to up our Patreon game. Get yourselves in a problem Squared activity book. Would you buy one? Tell us. At a Problem Squared on Twitter or Instagram. If you can find us. I see what you did there.

That's from the intro. That's from the intro. In this episode. I've been on a search for sets of five words with five letters. I'm going to improve your improvisation. And we have any other cheeseness. I see what you did there. Yeah, thank you.

It's the other business, but one of them, this thing about cheese. What are you going to do? Yum, yum, yum. Matt, how have you been since the last episode? I've been good. I've been making videos, changing lives. Oh, yes. Yeah. The usual.

You know this. I don't watch your videos as much as I should. No, that's fine. That's the correct amount of watching my videos. No, don't say that to your fans. No, well, I think, actually, I was talking to someone about this today, my office mate, about the etiquette, if you're friends with YouTubers, how much you watch their videos. And the kind of the general consensus is not all of them. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, I do occasionally watch them.

I really like them. Like I genuinely enjoy watching them. But I tend to watch your things when they come up and I go, oh, yeah, he talked about that briefly. Oh, I know he was in Antarctica. You're doing it as a professional obligation. No, no, just as in like I wanted to know more about that. Because I know a lot of YouTubers,

but I don't think I am friends with any YouTuber where I watch every video on their channel. See, I don't even watch YouTube that much. I watch a lot of YouTube. So actually I am in a position to be able to, let's say, watch every Steve Mould video. But a lot of them I'm like, no, I don't know what he's going to do, blah, blah, blah.

Steve, Steve, Steve. You like Steve. You like what Steve likes. I Yeah, yeah, yeah. Steve, Steve, Steve. You like Steve. You like what Steve likes. I get it. I got enough Steve in my life already. Yeah, yeah. And that's how I feel about you. Exactly.

No, wait. Yeah, so I never expect anyone to have watched all my videos. Did you watch the Drake one, the meme? So I didn't, but I saw the meme on Twitter and loved it. Oh, yeah, on the recursion meme version. I saw the recursion one. So I retweeted that saying, my friend is both very intelligent and an idiot.

Correct, correct. As our local cultural expert, we'd like to very quickly summarize the Drake meme. Yeah, so I believe it's from the video clip the music video uh hotline bling oh wow you didn't yeah i'm getting a nod from lauren who is my backup pop culture oh she's confirmed that excellent good good and uh the meme is it's a still of drake holding his hands it's almost in a dab type position he's sort of looking away like oh no get away from me yeah he's shunning he's shunning and then the next frame is uh him looking real happy and and so people will next to the frame

of him shunning put a thing that they don't like yep and then next to the one of him happy put the the thing they do like so if it's like normal digestives for the shun but chocolate digest there you go so it's like another version of you shun this thing, but this version is way better. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And someone shared online a maths version of that where they had the values for the sine function at the top, which is like the trigonomic function. You put an angle in it, you get a value out. The details aren't important.

And then underneath they had another way of writing the same values. Right, right. And they rearranged them to make them look like they formed a pattern. So they rearranged it, and the details aren't important. They had the square root of 0 over 2, the square root of 1 over 2, the square root of 2 over 2, the square root of a number over two. And so it looks really neat. And the first version looks a bit disjoint.

And they were like, oh, isn't this a great way to do it? And so I saw it and went, no, but the problem is it looks like a nice pattern, but there's no pattern there. It's just artificially been massaged to resemble a pattern. Well, that's a nice way of putting it. Did you say that in the video as well? I did not, but I should have. Yeah. Artificially massaged to resemble a pattern. Well, that's a nice way of putting it. Did you say that in the video as well? I did not, but I should have. Yeah, artificially massaged.

I would go there. You'd go to an artificial masseuse? Yeah. Yeah. Get a robot. Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

So anyway, so I got upset at this pattern because maths is all about finding and exploring patterns. Yeah. And this was just like a decoy pattern. It was like a phantom pattern. Yeah. And this was just like a decoy pattern. It was like a phantom pattern. Yeah. And I was like, that's really upsetting. I don't like that.

I then made a video where I basically dunked on this thing for like 10 minutes where I'm like, this is a stupid pattern. It's not a real pattern. And I both tore apart why the values could do that and why they exist. And the kind of, if if you then what if you take this too seriously and overanalyze it and see what happens yeah and why are some other ways of looking at it and things that i've found that i think uh are variations on something because i always like that i like to take things too seriously and add something on my own what i didn't realize is that that fake the faux atom yeah turns out people have been taught this as a memorization technique

that's taught in some schools but obviously in countries where i'm not familiar with the education system so maybe like in the us a lot of people had learned this at school from teachers they liked they thought it was a good way to remember the values of sign and then i come along and i'm basically just punching their favorite teacher in the face saying that what they taught them is stupid. I would watch that video. It's great. Matt Parker punches Mrs. Ogden right in the mush. It's like a very lazy remake of Punk'd.

Yeah. Punched. Punched. Solely teachers. If I'd realized that, I would have made a bigger point, which is a lot of maths, because you have to pass exams, comes down to just memorizing stuff. And so a lot of teachers are torn between wanting to teach students the actual beauty and wonder of mathematics versus, here's some shortcuts, learn these, you'll pass your exams.

Yeah. And this is one of those shortcuts, learn this. It will give you no insight into the maths, but it's easy to remember and you'll pass your exam. People just got very, very upset. And there's a thing in teaching, in secondary school teaching, where students will defend their primary school teachers to the death. Like if a student was taught something by their primary school teacher

and then you contradict it in secondary school, they will get very upset because their teacher told them that. That's true. That's the only way of doing it. I signed all over people's childhood. I upset the internet. Yeah. But the video was very funny because I filmed it in reverse order and I gradually shaved. We can bring it back to the Drake thing. Well, by the end of the video, I dressed like Drake. Oh, okay. But the way I filmed it is I start off looking like Drake because I had a real beard and Lucy styled it to look like the Drake meme. I did notice that you attempted to style it like it looked like Drake.

I gave it a go. And then I gradually shave off my Drake beard. So if you watch the video, the traditional way YouTube serves it up, it looks like I'm growing the beard to look more like. And so it was meant to be like me getting more and more obsessed with this stupid meme. It takes me over. And by the end of it, I'm in the meme.

I am the meme. Yeah. I tweeted the meme. And that was, that's how I've been. How are you doing? Oh, yeah. I forgot. I thought we were on a problem.

Yeah, no. Well, I was going to say I, so we finished filming the Makeaway takeaway block in the studio oh yeah yep we've still got um location shooting to do but all the studio stuff's done all studio stuff done and so my brother mike who we've we had briefly on the the t-shirt uh episode his best friend james who i've known since he was about four, James got married earlier this year to Sophie, who is our professional dentist who gave us advice on teeth tips and defining decades, I believe, is the episode.

It might be episode two. It was early. Yeah, real early on. And so they were in town for their honeymoon because I couldn't make it out for their wedding. Yeah. But they were over here visiting other family and stuff for their honeymoon and obviously it was very busy. They couldn't make it out for their wedding, but they were over here visiting other family and stuff for their honeymoon.

And obviously it was very busy, but I was like, well, why don't you swing by the studio and come towards the end of the day? You can watch some of the filming and then we'll go get a pint. So they did that. It was lovely. They got to watch me have bubbles put directly in my eyes and I breathed them in and I got soap in my lungs and I coughed and I complained the whole time. I would have come across like a right diva you are yeah i wanted us to use shaving foam they wanted to use real foam real bubbles very funny and then my eyes started watering and they got to hear all about it and also i was like put it in my eyes like i was very

much like i will take some of the blame as well. But the TV is repetitive. You've got to do the same thing over and over again because something might mess up. And then you've got to wait for some other thing to happen. You've got to move cameras or be quiet. The lighting guy makes an imperceivable change. Yes. Yeah, exactly.

Or loads of stuff like that. And so I was a bit worried they might get bored. But I forgot that if you haven't been doing that for 12 hours a day, then actually it's really nice. So they had a great time. In fact, I got, there's a photo of us on the set. So I'll put a photo on socials, on the Instagrams and the Twitters. But I was going to say, we were talking about the little things that couples do, or it might

be you and a housemate, but someone who you're very close with ridiculous running jokes very close with very intimate with yeah you have those running gags yeah and so they play a game called uh tiny emotions where they they just pull a very very subtle slight facial expression and the other has to guess what it specifically is. Is it like right down to I wanted HP sauce but they only had barbecue? Yeah, yeah, yeah. That specific emotion. Yeah. Are you doing it right now? I can't tell.

No, no, no, no, no. This is just my resting face. Yeah, it is. Your eyebrow is slightly raised. I was like, oh, no, he's doing it right now. Because I was just thinking. Was your slightly raised eyebrow you thinking? That was me thinking it would be very funny to do the emotion.

Now is not the time to play tiny emotions. Oh, nice. But then I was like, no, that's. No, no, it doesn't work on a podcast. This is a gift to the audience. You can all play this. You can all play this at home. When Gav and I go to sleep, just before we go to sleep,

I like to say bye and then that's it. And then roll over and go to sleep. The other day, Lucy,y my wife was about to ask me there was something like something tedious that we had to do or whatever and as i knew she was about to do it i forget where i was but i was able to just shout bye and then disappear and she was like don't you dare back me that makes me very happy yeah yeah yeah i love it, yeah, love it. I pulled it back. You pulled it back.

Yeah. Yeah, excellent. I'm just infiltrating your whole life. Yep. That's my catch-up. The end. The end. Bye.

Bye. This first problem comes to Matt from Daniel. How many guesses can you do in Wordle before you have to repeat letters? Obviously, after five words, you'd have to, but is it possible to guess five actual words with five unique letters? Matt, I'm going to get you to explain that to me like you did with the segment stuff last time. Oh, this is great.

This is really good. So this is a – we have a lot of Wordle problems sent into us. Yeah. And so Wordle's a game. It's a bit like a game I used to play as a kid called Mental Mastermind. Yeah. Yeah. It's almost exactly that.

Yeah. And so you've got to try and guess what the word is. And it's always a five letter word. And so you start with no information. So you're like, it could be literally any five letter word. And so you pick one, you type it in. It tells you if you've got any letters correct, and it tells you if they're in the right place or not.

And you get a number of guesses, and that gives you more information. You work out what the final one is. Now, Daniel's problem here is Wordle-inspired because it's not actually useful for Wordle. A lot of people are like, oh, what's the strategy for Wordle? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we're not here to help you game the system, guys. No, and neither is that.

I don't play Wordle. Do you play Wordle? No. What you're saying is if no one has played Wordle or they know what Wordle is, that doesn't matter. They can still enjoy this part of the podcast. This is Wordle inspired. Not going to help you with Wordle, but then you'll think for Wordle,

if you pick words that have five distinct letters, you maximize your chance of finding out the maximum number of letters that could be in the solution. Because if you pick a word with the same letter twice, you're almost wasting your guess. You might learn where it is, but it's not that good. But then Daniel's like, well, hang on. Is it possible to choose five words such that they've all got different letters to each other? So there are 26 letters in the alphabet. So you could have five words, each with five letters. Oh, yeah.

And you'd have 25 different letters and one left over. So you get one for free that you can ignore. But can you find five words? A wildcard letter. A wildcard, yeah. Now, I had to think about it and I spent ones of minutes wondering if I could try and just work it out by thinking of words. Yeah, because my immediate

thing is, okay, there's five vowels, so let's split them up. You're right, yeah. Because you typically want one vowel in each. You can have an average of one vowel per word. Yeah. That's going to limit your options. But you can't do plurals or anything. I might be able to say like binds. Yeah, but then you can't do walks.

Yeah. Because the S is already walked. Exactly. So I spent like a minute or two basically doing this, thinking how would I work that out? I'm like, just check all the words. Yeah, sure, why not? How many words are there?

Great question, Bec. So I have a database of words that I use whenever I need all the words. It's called a dictionary? Nah, nah. I want a big old text file. And it's a very generous definition of words. If it is even remotely likely to be a word, it's in there. Right.

So I'm just using normal alphabet, the 26 letters. And there are 370,105 words. It's a lot. Because the idea is you use it, like if you're writing some code that has to check every word. And then later on you can decide if you want to exclude options. But to start with you get absolutely everything. I then took those 370,105 words and just took out all the ones that only have five letters. Of which there are 15,920. Okay. Yeah. That's workable.

That's not bad. It's not bad. It's not bad. It's not a lot either because if you think about it, if you could have any five letters, there are a lot of possible words. In fact, there's over 11 million possible words. Right. But as humans, we've decided most of them don't count. And there's no systematic way to know what's a word and what's not. No one uses ooh.

Not nearly enough. Just five O's. Yeah. Ah. Yeah. But they don't count it as a word. No. They should. No, uses ooh. Not nearly enough. Just five O's. Yeah. Ah. Yeah. But they don't count it as a word. No. They should.

No, they should. There's a lot of spare words out there is what I'm saying. Yeah, cool. So we use a tiny fraction of the possible words. Now, of those 15,920 words, a bunch of them have duplicate letters in them. So they're not going to be part of the solution to this problem. You chuck them out, you're down to 10,175 words. That is actually, I thought loads more would go out.

Yeah. No, not that many. A third of five-letter words have duplicate letters. Looks. Or more. Yeah, exactly. Those are the two. And then, but then I'm like, well, now I've got words that are anagrams of each other that have

the same letters. I don't need to double check the same letters twice because if you've got one word with those letters, you don't need the other one. Satan and Santa. Exactly. Exactly. So then I went through and took out all the duplicates and was left with 5,977. So that's down to about half.

We're just under 6,000 words. So 5,000 of them, we're trying complete anagrams of each other. Yeah. Wow. So on average, give or take, if you're a five-letter word with different letters, you've got an average of one anagram. That's a lot of overlap. So unlike 6,000 five-letter words Hmm. There's a lot of overlap. So I'm like 6,000 further words that removing anagrams have five unique letters. The problem is now how on earth do I check combinations of those? Like it's an outrageous number of combinations. So what I did was first of all, pair them up.

So I compared every pair of possible words from those 6,000 and checked if they, between them had 10 unique letters or if they had overlaps. And so I ended up with a list of just over 3 million pairs of words that had 10 unique letters. Wait, what? So if I had like short and milky, okay, that's now a pair of words that don't have any letters in common and have 10 distinct letters between them. I now know if I'm looking for five words that have 25 different letters, that's a possible start to one of those solutions. Those two together. Got it. Got it. So you've got like roughly 5,000, 6,000 words. Yep. But you've got like million combinations. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

There's a lot of combinations. Right. So you just went from being like, oh, maybe I can find out of these 6,000. Oh, no, now I have to. Oh, it gets worse. And then it gets way worse again because now I've got to pair up all of those 3 million pairs with the other. Oh, no.

I need pairs of pairs. Yeah. And if each of those, if there's no overlap, if I've now got 20 unique letters, I've still got to compare those up with all of the 6,000 original words. I don't like this. I feel like there would have been an easier way to do this. Nope. So I basically, I wrote that code and I set my laptop going for over a month. What?

It just sat there. And this is a problem. It just sat there. And this is the problem. If you're trying to solve all these problems in combinatorics, you've got to be a little bit clever to whittle down the options, which is why I was in advance. Instead of just getting all the words and comparing groups of five, I wanted to whittle it down at each step,

which is why I removed all the duplicate words. Then I did pairs and removed all the pairs that didn't work. And then did pairs of pairs and only the pairs of pairs that worked, I then would check the fifth word. But even then, it's a lot. Is it? All right.

So let me try and work out if my brain has understood this. Yep. It's kind of like, so let's say you had short and milky. Yes. So let's say you write short. Yep. And then you go milky. And then you list another word that has different letters to short.

And another word that has different letters to short. And those are all your pairs. Yep. And then, okay, what's the next word that isn't in any of those ones? But instead of doing a next word, I would then compare it to all the pairs. Take short and milky and compare it to every other pair of words that don't have any letters in common. Oh. To see if between them, the pair of pairs

has now 20 letters that are unique. How is that a better way of doing it than what I said? Way fewer options. Could you ever miss something? You might check a new word against short and milky and it has no letters in common, but it hasn't got any other pair word that would go with it. Do you want me to give you some actual? Yeah, give me an example of three.

Okay, let me give you a three. Wick, W-H-I-C-K. Spung, S-P-U-N-G. That's a word. Love it. Barmy, B-A-R-M-Y. Okay. So let's say I've got those three.

Yeah. But then let's say there are no, there's nothing, let's say all the words are used up after, like, like there's no other words left over that don't cross over. So for me, that would be a, all right, we don't do that. So let's go to the next one. So we've got wick, spung, and then I would try it with a different word. And so that's how I would do it. I would just go like. Too many options. Too many options.

Too many. If you just checked all the combinations like that, and you've already whittled it down to my roughly 6,000 words, you just go through the combinations. If you could do a million of those per second, which is more I think than a computer can do, it would take you 241,885 years. Wow.

What I realized was I would need to find ways to prune options real early, which is why before I even thought about doing groups of five words, I just found all the groups of two words that work. Because if it doesn't work in a group of two, it's not going to work in a group of five. Right. Right. So you've just like halved it. More than half.

More than half because it's out of five. Because so many don't work. So many fall over at the second hurdle. Right. I can just throw them all out. Is the way I was thinking of doing it, is that any way similar to these are all the combinations that could be and now we're seeing which ones will actually let us get back to. Pretty much, yeah, yeah.

To the initial ingredients. We're trying to work out what the ingredients are on the menu or what our choices are on the menu. There's a bunch of other choices there that won't work. But what I'm saying is if you're picking five things to see if they taste good together, if two of them don't taste good together, you don't even have to worry about trying to pair them up with other stuff because it's already a bad combination.

Yes. So you can forget that whole... Got it. Whole family of meals can go. I see. You want to make a meal with five items, but they've all got to taste good together. So first of all, you try every pair of items and you only keep a list of pairs of food that taste good together. So I have a chocolate milkshake and some fries.

You're like, that's great. It's in. But then you're like a cheeseburger and something that clashes with a… Carrot steaks. Exactly. That's terrible. Gone. But then you start looking at what if I had this pair and this pair to make a meal of four things?

Would that still taste good altogether? And then so then you only find the pairs of pairs that are good together. Yeah. And then once you got that, you do a final check for what could be the fifth item to complete the meal. Nice. Now you just got to check the original 6,000. That still took over a month of computing time. Wow.

I potentially could have been. there are probably other ways, but all I did was I kept making it more and more efficient and I'll do a little test run and then I extrapolate how long would this take. And once I got it down to on the scale of months, I'm like, well, off you go. It'll just sit there now and take away on the laptop. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. I'm on board now. I do on the laptop. Okay. Okay. Okay.

Okay. I'm on board now. I do it from scratch. Yeah. Yeah. You did do it from scratch and that's why it would have taken frigging forever. I found 538 combinations of five words that have 25 unique letters. So you've answered the question.

Well. Oh. This is where I need your help, Bec. Okay. 470 of those all contain the same word. And like I said, I started with every possible word to not rule out any options. Yeah. And 470 of my options contain the word F-L-D-X-T. That's a real word. Fluid extract is how it's pronounced it's an abbreviation of that's not a word that's an abbreviation f l d x why are you allowed abbreviations i don't know i just started with every your combination would have been so much quicker if you'd taken out abbreviations so true so true do you also have yeah do you also have

la mafeo in there oh I bet it's in there. Oh, yeah, they're all in there. Laughing on my, no, rolling on my ass, ruffle my. But it's your rufflecopter? No, it's too long. So I went through, I mean, you're right. I could have made my life a lot easier by not doing every single possible thing that's even remotely. Those aren't words, Matt.

They're abbreviations. Yeah, I know. But if I take fluid extract and Google it now. No, but it's not about Google results. Is it in the dictionary? It's in the dictionary. Collins Dictionary. Fluxquent definition of meaning.

Fluid extract. Oh, my goodness. There you are. For shame, Collins. Who's to say what's a word and what's not a word? Collins. Now everyone knows what you can play in Scrabble and everyone will hate you. Well, this is why I didn't narrow my search to start with.

So if you include Flux, then there are 470 that use that. The vast majority. And I don't think that's going to be showing up on Wordle. You're not wasting a vowel. No. You've got your X. You've got your X. You've got your F. Like you're getting rid of some big ticket letters in this one.

Yeah, but you are losing the second most common letter in the alphabet. Yeah, T. T's gone. But apparently it's worth it. So there's now 68 left that don't use fluid extract. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I show you what I think are the least ridiculous word solutions and you can tell me if you think they're they're valid yeah and here's what i did i took every

single word that was in all of my solutions wrote some bit of coding script to google it nice and to get the number of responses so i could rank all the words by how many pages google thinks they're on as a measurement of how legitimate is this word. And how many of them are websites where people are just mashing their keyboards? Probably a lot. I didn't then look at where they came from. So do you want the highest ranked response? Yeah, I do want to hear it.

I'll give you the worst word first. Here it is. Vibex. V-I-B-E-X. Yeah, I could Vibex with that. Vibex. There you are. There you arex yeah i could vibex with that vibex there you are there you are i could go with that vibex i would be annoyed because i don't use it but it sounds like a word sounds like a word glyph as in hieroglyph yeah g-l-y-p-h yeah absolutely good word good word again i'd be

annoyed because it's not a common but i'd be like yeah that's a legit word months m-u-n-t-z isn't that a name i think it is a name i think it's a name but so i think it's someone matt if you go by google results are you getting it where it's just someone's surname i think something was named after them no months metal yeah so they had a metal color named after them what color is it uh yellow it's giving a gold prize beautiful month's month's prize yeah now here you've got a choice with those three solid start i can say you can now either go dwarf and jocks oh so both like both legit words yeah or you can go fjordwax. W-A-C-K-S. Oh, yeah, like someone takes a wax.

Yeah. Actually, my original code gave me SWAC. Then I realized, because I've taken out all the anagrams, and then I realized, but what if I've thrown out the anagram that's a more legitimate word and kept the dud one? Does this mean some of these might end up having anagrams's a more legitimate word and kept the kept the dud one does this mean some of these might end up having anagrams of words that are actually better nope because i went back i found every single anagram for every single word in the solutions googled all of those and picked the highest ranking word of course he did of every set of anagrams you did a dexter

which is is the gold standard for new listeners, the month standard of someone's offspring who listens to the podcast and does things very thoroughly. Yes. Which I believe I have done here. So that came in quite high. And you can see how often there are words in common. So there's another one.

Okay, this one you're probably not going to like. It's got headquarters,dqrs it's another abbreviation no this is no no they're gone there's quite a few headquarters yeah there's um zhmud there's a bunch of them no i don't know what that is now you're wordle used that do you know what the world would be on fire now wordle doesnle doesn't. People would throw their phones out. They'd be hitting pedestrians. Actually, you made a good point here, right? Because I've got every single word and some of these you're not happy with, but the original problem had the criteria, Wordle.

Sure, I've got my 538 options, of which 470 have fluid extract. These are all delicious, but would McDonald's sell them? See, thank you. Thank you for keeping the analogy on brand. Yeah. So I then found the original version of Wordle before the New York Times bought them. And I think they've changed the code.

If you looked in the code, people reverse engineered the code from Wordle, there are two massive lists of words in there. One is a list of all the answers in the order they appear. So you've actually, you can just look up what tomorrow's Wordle will be. Oh my goodness. I think the New York Times have since changed this. Yeah, right. But the original version, because it was just like some code a person put together, there's

just the list every day. This is the word for this day, the word for this day. There's another big list of all the words that are acceptable guesses that it counts as words. And so if you combine those in Wordle, they recognize 12,972 five-letter words that are either acceptable answers to the puzzle or acceptable guesses. And even correlate. I then compared every single solution of mine against the list of Wordle words and then counted how many of the words in my solutions appeared in the Wordle list. Five of them had none.

Wow. 85 had one. Oh. 85 had one. Oh. 210 had two. Mm-hmm. 193 had three. Mm-hmm. 44 had four.

Mm-hmm. Looking for a perfect match of all five? Yeah. One. Oh! There is one. Oh, my goodness. There's exactly one.

This is big news. I could not believe it. When I ran the code and it spits back the single valid wordle authorized, it could not be better. That's a real monster answer. Well, it is slightly better. Uh-huh. Fjord.

Fjord. Gux. Gux. Gux? G-U-C-K-S. Okay. As in, oh, I got some guck on this. Oh, I got some guck on that. These are different guck.

How many different gucks are there? Gux. Yeah. Nymph. Oh, yeah, yeah. Which is biology and in mythology. And Shakespeare. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Vibex.x nice which we've already vibed with waltz oh yeah waltz they are all valid wordle words according to the original

version of wordle they are five five letter words and between them they have 25 letters. So that is the sole solution to Daniel's problem. Five words, 25 letters, all different. Fjord, Gux, Nymph, Vibex. So there you are. One final solution. It just took over a month of computing time, plus all my programming and processing, analyzing time. Please turn this into a video. I've been working on this for a long time.

I might make a video. Yes. You must do that. Yeah. And I have to give you a, I'm going to give you a dings. I'm going to put an S on the end so you've got five letters. Five letters, all different. Dings.

Dings. Thank you. different things. Thank you. Next problem in is from Jacob, who says they've been taking improv classes and it's some of the most fun they've had in a long time. Oh, and Bec, you've done improv classes? I did. I did an improv course early this year.

You enjoyed it? I loved it. I want to do more, but I've been busy filming. Jacob has come to the right place with their problem. Oh, yeah. Because the problem is they then say, however, I found that while I enjoy doing structured short form scenes, I have a hard time making myself step out on stage in unstructured long form shows. Ah, yeah.

Yeah. I feel like I get caught up in my own head, which makes me hesitate for long enough that other people have already stepped out to do the scene. How do I get myself to do more scenes in shows and not get stuck in the back line? Jacob's problem. And you are uniquely qualified to deal with this. Yeah. Well, I am somewhat qualified.

No. Jacob is actually a higher level than me. Wait, there are levels? Yeah, yeah. What is actually a higher level than me. Wait, there are levels? Yeah, yeah. What is this? Scientology? Yeah. Jacob did mention in another part of their submission that.

The background information. They are in level three. And I have only done but level one. Oh, wow. I'm a butter baby. You're merely a yes and. Jacob's a yes and and and yeah that works yep that's exactly how it works and so i i mean i could answer as someone who is used to you know

having to jump out and do stuff there's no one more confident and prepared to share their expertise than someone who's just started to learn something yeah and has gotten has mastered the level one under you know what you've got knowledge to share yeah you can't see me right now but i've just i've just put my foot up on the chair yeah you're like wow i remember when i was a level zero yeah it's probably don't start it with level zero. You're already level one as soon as you start. That's true because you haven't started. You call all of us level zeros.

It's like how the military say civvies. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, you guys are the zeros. The zeros. So I thought, as much as I love to pretend I know everything, I was interested because I think that's a good question. I also enjoy doing short form scenes.

You tend to do that more when you start out. They don't get you doing the full massive long unstructured stuff until you're further down the track. Yeah, level three apparently. So I haven't actually done that yet. So I wanted to know the answer as well. Now this is the thing. There might be people who are thinking, I don't do improv, Bec. I have no interest in doing improv.

Why would I care about the answer to this question? Improv's a cult. Imagine someone thinking that and being polite enough to not say it. Yeah. They would just switch off the podcast. And I mean to say don't switch off because this type of thing also applies to a lot of other stuff in life. You could be in a different type of cult.

If you're the sort of person, yeah. And you just want the leader to notice you. If you work in an office or anything with like a team of people, you don't step up with your ideas fast enough. Yeah. Or you find it hard to speak up when everyone else is so much louder. You know, those sorts of things. I think you could learn a lot from this and take much louder you know those sorts of things I think

you could learn a lot from this and take it with you into those areas that makes sense it's the confidence and decision making to share in a short time frame make a decision quick boom out and that is a hard thing to do I struggle with it I think most people do I often think I wonder what Beck's thinking do you though she hasn't voiced you know that you know that i'm thinking about cheese the answer is always cheese always so i i thought do you know what i've got lots of very very good improviser buddies and i said here's here's uh here's a question from one of our listeners what would your advice be and i thought it would be like you know in comedians when you ask comedians to do something and you end up chasing all of them later for like one answer.

Yep. Turns out improvisers are very used to yes and. Oh, you give them a set up. So not only did they pretty much all respond, but they all gave me far longer than I asked for. Did you cast the net wide assuming? Yeah, I did. You'd have to ask a lot of people

to get a handful. Yeah. Yeah. So what I've done is I've, I've got some here. I'm going to play you the advice that I've had from these improvisers. So this is Alex Holland who runs the free association, which is kind of like, you know, second city or the big ones in the States. Upright Citizens Brigade. Yeah. So that's kind of like London's know, Second City or the big ones in the States. Upright Citizens Brigade. Yeah, so that's kind of like London's version of all those things, the Free Association. This is Alex, who runs that. It sounds to me like you're obviously putting a lot of pressure on yourself

when you're on stage. I imagine you're worrying about things like, will the audience like me? Are they going to laugh at the things I'm doing? My advice to you is to say to yourself before you go on stage, it's fine if I'm not funny in the show tonight. Give yourself permission to not make anyone laugh in the show because that way you're stopping worrying about what the audience reaction is going to be and you're focusing on what's important. Your job is just to do good improv

and that's done by listening to and connecting with your teammates and reacting in the moment to what's happening on stage. If you're worrying about the audience then you're worrying and second guessing all of your choices but just try and focus in on them to what's happening on stage. If you're worrying about the audience, then you're worrying and second guessing all of your choices, but just try and focus in on them. Give yourself that permission to not have to try and be funny with everything you're doing on stage and just react in the moment to what's happening. And hopefully you'll just be jumping out more

and doing all the good stuff you do in class. That's my policy of all of my shows. Give yourself permission not to be funny. Yep, yep. But I think it's great advice and it actually reminded me and apologies listeners if i've talked about this before but one of the exercises we did in the level one course that i got the most from was where we had to do a scene that was as realistic as possible so the point wasn't to be funny it was to be as natural as

possible okay it was so counter intuitive to what I'm used to because I'm always where's the gag where's the punchline it was like myself and someone else and they're a cab driver dropping me off somewhere and it was just us having a conversation but like trying to be true to that character and the scenes and then after time you do start to find these funny moments that we didn't mean to or we didn't want is just they were so inherent to the characters they felt right and it was just a really nice way of going oh and I think yeah again if I was in a meeting or something and I was worried about oh will everyone like this idea will it work I what if they don't like it what if this then you're not thinking about actually what

how am I responding to what people need right now. I mean, I've got the policy they can't all be winners. There are many mottos. They can't all be winners. Yeah. They can't all be months. Yeah. You can't be, you know, solid months beginning to end.

So I go about life with the motto they can't all be winners. Statistically, it's impossible. And if you're not messing it up and saying things that don't work, you're not trying enough. Well, with that in mind, this was another piece of advice from the wonderful David Reed, who's in the Penny Dreadfuls. Oh, they're great. The audience isn't just watching you spontaneously create stuff.

They are watching you fail sometimes as well. And there's merit to that too. Like that is entertaining. That's dangerous. In a way, they are watching you be brave. And your bravery isn't contingent on it going well. Stepping forward, not knowing what you're about to say, is brave whether what you say elicits a massive laugh or nothing at all. You've just got to push yourself

and say, well, I don't need to know what I'm going to say before I step forward. You step forward first. If you've got a fully formed line and idea of what's going to happen next, before you step forward, you're technically not doing improv. You're just writing live. I hope that's helpful. I think what I like about David's advice is that it echoes something that I often tell people who just started stand upup which is that the audience wants you to do well. Oh yeah, they're on your side. Yeah, a lot of people say, oh, what if I get heckled or what if this? And that's so rare.

Most of the time people just really want you to do well. They pay money to enjoy themselves. Yeah. So in whatever situation you're in, most people are on your side. Yeah. I think that's worth bearing in mind. Well, I take from that is bravery isn't succeeding. Bravery is trying.

Yes. Yeah. You're absolutely right. You've got to give it a go. And it is about the bravery. And again. None of my mottos. Give it a go.

Give it a go. Give it a go. And in a way, I think that matches up quite nicely with some advice I got from Rachel Paris, who's in the MASH report with Nish Kumar. And she's in the improv troupe, Ostentatious. Which is Jane Austen novels. Yeah. Improvised.

That's very good. They've done West End. It is excellent. Yeah. And she's great. Just stand up comedian as well. Oh, and she's in Greece, by the way. Oh, and she's in Greece, by the way. She's on holiday in Greece and still took the time out to answer Jacob's question.

But Rachel provided this advice. If you feel nervous about coming into an improv scene to be the first one on the stage, first of all, that makes so much sense. Of course it does. You know, you're coming onto a blank space and it can be nerve-wracking but that's an exciting thing the first thing i'd say is embrace your nerves means that you're excited means that you know that it matters but mainly i would say when you're doing improv with other people with one other person perhaps that's such a gift that's

some of my favorite scenes is when both of you have absolutely nothing at the start. You look into each other's eyes. You look at what the other person is doing with their body, with their fingers. Where are they looking on stage? What's their expression? What does their hair look like? And take an idea from that and just build it together. You don't need an inspiring or funny idea to come on with some improv schools so you do i disagree i think coming on with nothing and finding it when you're up there in the spotlight that's the gift so trust your partner or trust the things around you to give you an idea you don't need to come with it that's my advice do you get a lot of people asking if you

still get nervous before shows all the time yeah everyone wants to know they ask you yep what's your what do you say my motto is if you're not nervous you're doing something wrong yeah yeah because you've got my theory is if you're not nervous you've accepted you've got nothing to gain or lose and for me the nerves are, I know how well the show could go, could go absolutely amazing, but it could just be fine. And my nerves are always because of the uncertainty of, and so I get nervous if I'm not nervous. One of your things isn't that it could be terrible.

Not even on the list. Because I've already given myself permission to not be funny. And so, yeah, I'm just going to give it a go. Yeah. So I always think if, yeah, there's good, because you know what? Bad nerves are when the nerves impact your performance. Yes. Good nerves are where they remind you what can be gained or lost.

And so I think if you're not nervous, then you've. I think the problem is when you start to wonder what sort of nerves you've got, like because good nerves can turn into bad nerves. If you let them using the office scenario, it might be that you are quite excited to share an idea that you've got, but then you start to get so worked up about that, that you, you can't physically say it because you're like, and you stumble on your way. And I do that all the time. And I think that's one thing is that could happen and that's fine. You know what? I'm still here.

You've made it this far. I've had more ideas taken than I've had, you know, not taken. Yeah. And especially more, what is it they say? You miss the shots you don't. You miss a million percent of the shots you don't take. Yeah. One piece of advice I have, if you're like me and get excess nerves,

dance about. Dance around a bit. Punch the air. I literally jump on the spot. Yeah. Get rid of the energy. My friend Tamandra, her pre-show thing, she puts her hands in the air and yells,

I don't know what I'm doing and runs around. I love that. It's so, and if people don't know she's about to do it, it's great. Yeah. It's great. Yeah. I think that's a's so, and if people don't know she's about to do it, it's great. Yeah. I think that's a lovely piece of advice.

So I got one more piece of advice for Jacob from another improviser extraordinaire, which is Josie Lawrence, who's a very famous UK improviser, started off in Whose Line Is It Anyway in the late 90s. Yep. Mid to late 90s. That's the month's standard for televised improv. That is. Even appeared on the American one. Oh. Yep.

So Josie Lawrence, very kindly took the time out to also answer Jacob's question. Try and clear your mind and think, all right, I've done the structured short form pieces and now I'm just going to throw myself into it. You're throwing yourself into that lake. You don't know how cold it's going to be. You don't know what's going to be in there, but you'll swim about and splash about and something will happen. Just free your mind and go with the flow. It's going to be okay. So obviously the most common theme amongst a lot of the advice there was don't think. Instead of standing there and getting caught, I know it's easy saying you're getting caught up

in your head. The first thing you do, just take a step, like physically step out. Cause that's what you do in improv. Just you take a step out from the back line. Yeah. So if you don't want to get stuck in the back line, step out of the back line and then trust yourself to just come up with it on the spot.

And you know what? Cause you're working with, you're working with other people. If you're not, if you're floundering, if you're stuck, if you're blanking, someone else is going to come in

and they're going to provide you with what you need because it's a team. It's a team effort. Likewise, in the office, if you don't have any good ideas, just start. That's what I do. I just start talking, Matt, all the time. We've talked about this, the verbal foot in the door. Yeah. Yeah. I just make a noise. There's some verbal momentum going. Yeah. Until the ideas come out of my face. The best way to decide how to finish a sentence is to start the sentence. That's right. Exactly.

There you go. I just want to thank all the improvisers who helped me solve that problem. So you can find Alex Holland and the Free Association at the Free Association. We're going to put links in the show notes. David Reed has a play called Guy Fawkes coming out in York soon, around Guy Fawkes night. In old York. Yes, as opposed to New York.

Yeah. Rachel Paris is all over the place in a good way. And Josie Lawrence is in the Comedy Store Players at the moment. Oh. Yeah. So thoroughly recommend that people go check those out. Between all of us. That is a good transferable thing, I think.

Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. I hope that's helped not just improvisers, but everyone listening. We all have to improvise sometimes. Futon. Futon. APS is a problem squared and aob is any other business a ob that's right it's any other

business where we deal with past problems from previous episodes if you have no minor updates and corrections yes if you have no idea what we're talking about, then go back and listen to the other episodes. Yeah. First of all, I'm going to kick it off, Matt. Okay. Yep. So a few people came back to us and said that they think that the definition of high fives, the way they're defined, is the position of the fingertips. So when you high five, fingertips are touching. But if you low-five. Hands are matching orientations.

Yeah, fingertips are facing the wrist. Yep. Right? Disagree. Oh. Yeah. I'll tell you why. Tell me.

On the side. Yeah. That's not a down low. No. But fingertips are facing wrists. Up top. I was just thinking the horizontal up top. Let's not reopen the issue. No. But was just thinking the non, the horizontal up top. Let's not reopen the issue.

No, but I just want to say, I mean, I appreciate you trying, guys. I know we make it look easier than it is. But I was pretty confident on that one. No, I say that. Do you know what? Whenever someone does send something that I might actually, that's correct. Yeah. I will.

Oh, we will acknowledge that. Like, for example, Josh. Yeah. Went to the problem posing page where you can also put in solutions and said, regarding if the moon was made of cheese and Dexter wanted to know, would there be fondue in the middle? Josh has pointed out the lunar core, because we couldn't be bothered to look it up, is 1,330 degrees Celsius and 45,000 atmospheres of pressure.

That's a lot. It's a lot. Now, in my wife's defense, who studies the sun, from her point of view, all other solar system bodies are dead rocks. Yeah, they're cold. Yeah, exactly. They're cold. She's like, that's still very cold compared to the almighty sun.

Now, Josh did give a reference linked to a published paper with that information. Good work. They then say they're not sure what the cheese phase diagram would look like. That's where you plot for every combination of temperature and pressure. You mark which state. So cheese can be solid or grated. Which state? So cheese can be solid or grated.

And then you then mark, or a plasma, where all of those are. Yeah. And his point is the moon surface goes from very cold and no pressure to in the very middle, hot enough to scorch, vaporize cheese probably in high pressure. He's pretty sure somewhere on the way in, there's going to be the fondue shell. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So great point, great point, Josh.

And I'm glad we could update everyone that if the moon was made of cheese, part of it would be at an appropriate fondue temperature, if not pressure. You could sit around a crater like you're ice fishing. Yeah. Just put your breadsticks on a fishing line. That'd be great. Great. That's great.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode, and we're thanking you in advance for telling everyone you know how much you enjoy it and how they should listen to it. They should listen too, yeah. Exactly. But we'd also like to thank our Patreons who support us financially and ensure that this show can happen and that for those of you who are unable to support us financially are able to listen to it.

And we like to randomly choose three people. We have a random thingy. It's a spreadsheet. It's a spreadsheet. And it chooses three names that we then read out. It does. Yeah, which we tend to mispronounce. Well, I think I'm going to get the first one right. Okay. Capital A, capital V.

There's a space in between them. A, V. Elliot Salmon. Tim Small. Oh my goodness. I think this might be the only time we've thanked Patreons. And we've got more. We hope. Yeah, no, this is be the only time we've thanked Patreons. And we've got them all, we hope.

Yeah, no, this is where they write back. Yeah, actually it's Tim Samal. The tear silent. Yeah. I'm small. This show is also brought to you by Matt Parker, myself, Beck Hill, and the ever-patient producer, Lauren Armstrong Carter, who is the face of the group. Bringing it back to the analogy. Nicely done.

Almost forgot the 18 thing there. Bec, we no longer have your card. No. It was bought for charity. Yes, and there was a bidding war. There was a bidding war. I was watching it. It ended up on two hilarious numbers. What was the first one?

Well, the postage was £3.14 because I got to set that. Yeah, I was going to say, that's not ending up on a hilarious number. That is you being a smartass. I picked it and it happened. Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. The winning bid was £69. Yeah, it was. Well done.

Well done. £69. The card is now in the post on its way to Singapore. Ooh. Do you know what I love about that? Is that it means that someone set their upper limit on ebay at 69 69 quid one of your one of your fans i suspect oh i hope so well we appreciate it and so does water aid