Results of the First World Palindrome Championship

Following up on my previous post about the first annual palindrome-writing competition, here is how it played out:

As mentioned on contestant Mark Saltveit's blog, Barry Duncan, who is the subject of an upcoming documentary (The Master Palindromist) had been invited to compete, but as he had not responded to the invitation, he was not expected to attend. Then he showed up on the day of the competition. His documentarian also attended and filmed the event, so we may get to see footage of the championship someday.

Doug Fink, writer of eight crossword puzzles (and more importantly the famous palindrome "Lisa Bonet ate no basil."), was selected from the audience as the final contestant.

Will Shortz announced that the contestants had to write palindromes meeting one of the following three constraints:

1. The palindrome must contain an X and a Z.


2. Or the palindrome must include a person or event in the news in the last 12 months.


3. Or the palindrome must be somehow about the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament

I was rather surprised by these constraints because writing a palindrome about someone in the news is something that many of the contestants may have already done, so it didn't really guarantee that the palindrome might not have been conceived of beforehand. I was also a little disappointed that there were multiple allowable routes; it would have been more interesting to see what the results would have been if the contestants had competed head-to-head, writing the same kind of palindrome. But possibly this multi-path set of constraints was used because any single constraint could have been too limiting, potentially resulting in insufficiently diverse or entertaining palindromes. Still, in the future, I might suggest a multi-round scheme, where all contestants write palindromes for each set of constraints, the palindromes are all separately scored by round, and whoever's total score is highest, wins.


Based on the votes of the audience (mostly competitive crossword puzzle solvers who were there for the weekend crossword tournament), Nick Montfort placed fourth for his reversible poem about the Millennium Falcon. Jon Agee's submission placed third: "'Zoning' is Mr. Al Axe's sex alarm sign in Oz." The runner-up was John Connett who wrote "'Not Newt,' Ron's snort went on." And (by a vote of 169 to 165) the winner and World Palindrome Champ was Mark Saltveit who wrote "Devil Kay fixes trapeze part; sex if yak lived." which he later described as "a tale of kinky shenanigans".


Saltveit wrote other palindromes during the allotted writing period including "I tan. I mull. In a way, Obama, I am a boy, a wan Illuminati."

He explained his third palindrome (which was about the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament) in this Metafilter Metatalk thread:

If anyone saw the film Wordplay, Al Sanders was the guy who has placed 3rd about 10 years in a row, and was eliminated due to a tragic error in the film after he clearly had won.

This palindrome predicts that he will finally win the tournament this year:
"Gal, smiles are stellar ere crossword rows sorcerer Al lets era's elim's lag."

(Incidentally, Metafilter is one of the coolest sites on the Internet.)

Even before learning that the crossword puzzle tournament was going to be one of the possible constraints for the palindromes, I was thinking that including crossword references would be a good way to play to the crowd. Maybe something like this reference to cryptic crossword puzzles would do:

We hate Seven Across: "Or can Eve set a hew?"

(Hint: It's only a caricature of cryptic crossword clues and not intended to be solved.)


Writing palindromes is not as easy as they make it look, so congratulations to Mark Saltveit and to all the contestants!

---

UPDATE: As Nick Montfort informed me in the comment thread, all of the palindromes presented by the contestants are being posted at http://palindromist.org/results. They are definitely worth checking out.

Also, Nick Montfort has posted his reflections on the event.

The First Annual World Palindrome Championship

I've learned that, as part of this year's American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (made famous through the documentary Wordplay), a live palindrome-writing competition is going to be held! Will Shortz will give some constraints on what the palindrome has to be about (presumably preventing the contestants from recycling old work), the contestants will write palindromes for 75 minutes, and the audience will choose the winners.

The contestants will include:

• Jon Agee, writer of many books of palindromes illustrated with cartoons including Go Hang a Salami! I'm a Lasagna Hog!: and Other Palindromes
  
• Martin Clear, who is apparently flying in from Australia to compete and who has definitely written a lot of palindromes. Like these

  Goddesses, bored now, assess a wonder-obsessed dog.
  
  Some modem telepaths in a Danish tape let me do memos.
  
  Tim lifted a cat; Elton did not let a cadet film it.

  He has even posted some palindromic poetry.
  
  But that's not why I'm subscribing to his blog; it's because of this poem:
  

  Mary had a little RAM
  It’s free space, wired and slow
  And every wire that Mary wet
  That RAM would short and blow.

  
  
• John Connett, professor of biostatistics, writer of these:
  

  Eva, can I stack Rod’s sad-ass, dork cats in a cave?
  
  No cab, eh, Ted? I sat up. I put aside the bacon.

• Nick Montfort who co-wrote 2002: A Palindrome Story, a 2002-word palindrome, written in 2002 (also available as an illustrated book). I know him from his contributions to the interactive fiction community, but he appears to be a professor of writing about interactive fiction and making cool online creative stuff (a field we can always use more professors in).
• Mark Saltveit, editor of The Palindromist - a magazine dedicated to palindromes (and also a great site where I found out a lot about the world of palindromes.) He also does stand-up comedy about palindromes.
  
  

  Pay on time, emit no yap.
  
  Art, anise, riff of fire: Sinatra.

• ... and one lucky contestant picked from the audience based on a demonstration of their palindrome prowess.

It's happening March 16th in Brooklyn. It costs $80 to get in the door. See the crossword puzzle tournament site for further details on the schedule.

Once I find out what the winning palindrome is, I will post a follow-up.

UPDATE: I found a soft profile of contestant Mark Saltveit and the World Palindrome Championship.

Stupid Bananagrams tricks: Word grid with mirror symmetry

I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to make a perfectly symmetric Bananagrams word grid using all 144 Bananagrams tiles. I decided to use mirror symmetry, so a word spelled out horizontally on the left hand side would have to be reversed on the right hand side and yet still spell a real word. Can it be done? Let's find out.

First, I consulted my letter distribution for Bananagrams to see which letters occurred an odd number of times in a Banangrams set. For instance, there are three W tiles, so I knew that at least one (and possibly all three) would have to occur on the center line of the grid to maintain mirror symmetry.

I then tried to build those letters into vertical words. Next I built some horizontal palindromes off of those center-line words. I got some good palindromic words from Wiktionary.

Finally, I worked on linking everything up. This step took the longest time. Fortunately, I found a list of words, that when reversed, yield different English words (like "tuba" and "abut"). These are called "semordnilaps". I particularly liked the ERGO/OGRE pair, so I managed to work that one into my grid. After a lot of fiddling around, I wound up with the grid shown below.

C H GAG R M OH E HO I MADAM I N A A N KNOW WONK E B E U EYE U R R R R OGRE ERGO BUN NUB O O X J P J X RECAPS A SPACER S I L V L I S L A E A L T T Q DEIFIED Q U A L A U I Z O Z I TIDE EWE EDIT V O O V Y TIN NIT Y F T F STATS D

Voila! The world's first palindromic Bananagrams grid!

Word Game Poetry

The idea of rearranging a set of Scrabble tiles to form a poem has been around for a long time. James Ernest of Cheapass Games is credited with popularizing Scrabble poems.

Here is an example of his Scrabble poetry, formed from 98 letters and 2 blanks:

FANATICS
YOU SEE
HAVE TAKEN OUR QUIET BURG

THEY CLIP POWER LINES
JAM _ADIO AND TV

FIRE BLAZING NEXT DOOR

WOE

I MIS_ GERALDO

This is obviously a work of fiction since no one really misses Geraldo.

I found a six stanza poem, in iambic pentameter, with each stanza made up of the 100 tiles of a Scrabble set. The first one reads:

THROUGH SENTIENT, GAUZY FLAME I VIEW LIFE'S DREAD,
QUIXOTIC, PARTIAL JOKE. WE'RE VAPOUR-BORN,
BY LOGIC AND EMOTION SEEN AS deAD.

It is an amazing achievement in Scrabble poetry.

Inspired, I have written what I believe to be the first Bananagrams poem, using all of the 144 Bananagrams letters.

I call it "Box in Woks".

I SMUGGLE A JAPANESE PUZZLE BOX IN A WOK.

THE BOX IS AJAR!

QUIVERING IN ANTICIPATION, I QUICKLY WRITE A BANANAGRAMS ODE.

"FEED LEFTOVER WORDS

TO HER VULTURE.

DECODE THE MYSTERY FOOD."

---

HOWTO:
The process of writing such a thing is not unlike playing a game of Bananagrams: it's easy at first, but then as you approach the end, you realize that you have to rearrange and optimize things more carefully and then iterate. "Iterating, I converge on a solution. Bananas!" Depending on how picky you are, it can take a really long time.

I didn't use this, but a useful guide to this kind of project is the The Art of Long Anagramming page.

If you would like to make your own Bananagrams poem, pangram, or other long anagram, this site has a Flash application that helps you track the number of each letter and the total sentence length. There are also downloadable versions for offline use.

Finally, this anagram generator has an advanced search, allowing the requirement or exclusion of words which is incredibly helpful.

What to do when you have too many vowels (other than panic)

This is the natural complement to the post about what to do when you have too many consonants. As mentioned before, if you dump one of your vowels, assuming that you are picking from the 144-letter Bananagrams distribution, you have an 8% chance of getting three vowels back. In my experience, if you have one extra vowel tile, and you just can't rearrange the grid to fit it in somewhere, even exchanging it for two vowels and a consonant tends to be easier to deal with. Of course, you could wind up with some consonants that are tricky to use (which may be why I rarely dump letters.. I also enjoy rearranging the grid).

Whatever approach you choose, you definitely want to know some words with a large percentage of vowels. There are some nice all-vowel words out there like aye, eye, and you. Here is a sampling of some longer vowel-heavy words:

eunoia (83% vowels)
eerie, adieu, audio, bayou (80%)
year, ooze, area, iota, auto (75%)
sequoia (71%)

"Eunoia" and "sequoia" are also distinctive for being two of the shortest word containing all five vowels. "Eunoia" may get you in trouble if you try to use it since it's an obscure word. [I am partial to it because it is a brain word. It comes from a Greek word meaning "beautiful/favorable thinking". The "beautiful thinking" interpretation led to the obscure English usage of "eunoia" - a state of normal mental health. A stricter reading suggests that the Greek word referred to thinking that was favorable to someone (like one's spouse). The "blissful and benevolent state of mind" interpretation, though questionable, is the nicest.]

If you are interested in obscure words on the extremes of human language, check out the All-Vowel Words and All-Consonant Words dictionaries. They start with tame words like "eau" and "brr" and then spin off into highly arcane references (at times approaching Borges-level bizarreness). They come packaged together in a book called "Wye's Dictionary of Improbable Words", downloadable from Lulu for ~$14.

Pangrams and what to do when you have too many consonants

Pangrams are sentences that use every letter in the alphabet at least once. Just a few examples:

• Nth quark biz gyps cwm fjeld vox. (which sounds like the shortest science fiction story ever)
• Vext cwm fly zing jabs Kurd qoph.
  which I like for the description:
  "An annoyed fly in a valley, humming shrilly, pokes at the nineteenth letter of the Hebrew alphabet that was drawn by a Kurd." (though I prefer the variation: Zing! Vext cwm fly jabs Kurd qoph.)
• Squdgy fez, blank jimp crwth vox! (Translation: An imperative sentence, commanding one's squashed-down brimless hat to mute the skimpy voice of a Celtic violin. I like this one particularly, as it was made by my current hero, Claude Shannon, whom I will write about eventually, elsewhere.)

There are many more 26-letter pangrams. By adding two letters, one can make parsable pangrammatic sentences like:

• Waltz, bad nymph, for quick jigs vex!

As pointed out by Robert Munafo: "The fact that so many optimal pangrams exist in English results mainly from its highly complex and flexible grammar, and the borrowing of so many words from other languages."

In particular, all of the 26-letter pangrams above use Welsh words (which have made their way into the English language), since in Welsh, the letter W is a semivowel. These words are a great way of dealing with a consonant-heavy round of Bananagrams. Check them out:

• cwm (pronounced /koom/) - a Welsh word meaning circular or bowl-like valley, often formed by a glacier.
• crwth (/krooth/) - an archaic Welsh stringed instrument - like a boxy violin (Parenthetically, writing this definition has inspired me to make up my own (suboptimal) pangram: The King of Quips seized the crwth (like a boxy violin) to jam.)

Another one is bwlch which means mountain-pass, and is kind of fun to say. "I pity the /boolch/!".

Some other good words for getting rid of consonants:

• hymns
• fjords
• rhythms
• strengths (the longest dictionary word with only one vowel)

The other option when you have too many consonants is, of course, to dump one of them, in hopes of getting some vowels. There are 63 vowels in a Bananagrams set (counting Y as a vowel), so if you pick 3 tiles from a random pool (starting with all 144 tiles), the probability of getting all consonants would be 81/144*80/143*79/142 which is about 18%. (The probability of getting all vowels is 8%.) [The odds could be computed more efficiently if you took into account all the tiles already turned over. This could be useful near the end of the game, but would seem to require superhuman ability to catalog all the displayed tiles. It seems more plausible in the final move of a Scrabble game.]

So, about 80% of the time you'd probably come out ahead (with one or more extra vowels) though possibly with much rearranging to do to use your new tiles. The other 20% of the time you'd just have more consonants and be even more stuck! This is one reason that I generally only dump at the beginning of a game or else when absolutely necessary.

Rearranging Bananagrams

BANANAGRAMS can be anagrammed into a lot of phrases. My favorite is the headline-like sentence "Agar Nabs Man".

But the most disturbing is not an anagram at all. Just add a space, and you get "Ban anagrams!"! Banning anagrams would be the position of the bad banana (with the greasy black peel).