My first Q-without-U word and Academic Games

I once played a game called LinguiSHTIK in a competitive situation. The other players were clearly veterans, and I was the rookie. They must have decided among themselves that they were going to take advantage of the newcomer. A big part of LinguiSHTIK is placing constraints on the word to be formed (e.g., must be four letters long, must be a noun, must contain a certain letter) while moving cubes with letters on them into either the ALLOWED or FORBIDDEN areas of the board. The other players made the requirements that the word must contain a Q and must not contain a U. Then at some point, one of them decided to CHALLENGE WIN, essentially saying that it was possible to make a word from the ALLOWED letters that satisfied all of the constraints. Fortunately, I had already come up with a word spelled with a Q but without a U - something I remembered from browsing through the Q section of the dictionary: QOPH (the 19th letter of the Hebrew alphabet). Somehow, I had managed to get the letters I needed into the ALLOWED set. When everyone revealed their words, the other players were kind of irritated: they had both been thinking of QAID (which was presumably the accepted Q-without-U word in that group) and they had never heard of QOPH. They challenged my word, but fortunately the dictionary contained the word QOPH, and I was vindicated.

WFF 'N PROOF, the manufacturers of LinguiSHTIK, have produced many other games, all having the same parallel-universe board game feel, probably because most of them have educational value as their primary design goal. These games do a good job of challenging the player while being fun enough as a game to suck the player in. Equations: The Game of Creative Mathematics is similar to LinguiSHTIK in that players are setting constraints and trying to find a solution that meets them, but with numbers and mathematical operations instead of letters and words. WFF 'N PROOF cites research suggesting that students who sometimes get to play Equations in math class skip classes less often and are better at applying math concepts.

The even more interesting claim is that another game boosts I.Q. test scores:

The first studies published (in 1972) on the effects of resource allocation games involved I.Q. tests on groups of students playing WFF 'N PROOF: The Game of Modern Logic intensively for three weeks in summer school classes. The average increase in the non-verbal I.Q. scores was more than 20 points. Although researchers have questions about the sort of intelligence actually measured by such tests, it is clear that there was a dramatic improvement in the problem-solving skills utilized in such exercises.

Another game that seems really compelling to me is Queries 'N Theories: The Game of Science & Language. It's the closest thing I have ever seen to a code-cracking game. One player makes up a "language" (consisting of fundamental allowed sentences and rules for transforming those sentences to other sentences). It's a bit like Mastermind except that where Mastermind has one secret sequence of colored tokens that the player is trying to infer, Queries 'n Theories starts off with such a sequence (a "sentence") which the first player morphs according to his transformational rules (like, every instance of GREEN RED transforms to RED YELLOW GREEN) and then presents the result - a more complex sentence in the language - to the other players. The other players then try to figure out the principles of the language by proposing possible sentences which are then accepted or rejected by the player who made up the language.

Like most of the WFF 'N PROOF games, Queries 'n Theories can be scaled down in complexity for the younger part of its age range (only sentences of length four for 12-year-olds) or scaled up to challenge more experienced players (sentences of length thirteen!). The most appealing part about this game, to my mind, is that it teaches scientific thinking and inductive reasoning.


There are two organizations that allow students to play some of these games against each other in a regular tournament: The Academic Games League of America and National Academic Games.

You can buy these games directly from Wff 'n Proof.

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Further reading: My previous post on Q-without-U words and a reference to another game about logic, invented by Lewis Carroll.

The Bananagrams iPhone app is on sale

If you have an iPhone or an iPod touch, you may be interested to know that the iPhone version of Bananagrams is now on sale for 99 cents. I wrote a partial review of this app when it first came out. There are some bugs in the 1.00 release, but the ability to move different tiles with different fingers simultaneously is just so appealing (even if I haven't mastered it yet) that I would rather play the iPhone version than the Facebook version of Bananagrams.

I recommend buying this game while it's on sale, as whenever Large Animal Games eventually releases a patched version of the game, the upgrade should be free.

There is no official Bananagrams dictionary

Many players like to cite the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary to validate words they use when playing Bananagrams. But as discussed in the last post, the OSPD has serious flaws and may not be the best choice for a reference. The official Bananagrams rules say that "any available dictionary may be used" to decide whether words are acceptable. Some better dictionaries to use with Bananagrams are listed here.

As an alternative, when playing Bananagrams among friends, the group can decide how strict it is going to be about word acceptability. A strict reading of the rules would say that if a word is in the dictionary, it is acceptable, whether or not it is slang. In the groups that I play, we are pretty lax, and frequently we do not even have a dictionary on hand. When playing without a readily accessible dictionary, the validity of words is sometimes debated, but the de facto standard is one of the following (I'm not sure which): 1) The word is only considered a rotten banana if it is misspelt or clearly not a word. 2) The word is considered a rotten banana if most people think it is wrong. 3) The word is considered a rotten banana if the person who played it relents and agrees that it is wrong (or questionable).

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Acknowledgments: My thanks to Chuck, who started an e-mail discussion with me which led to this post and a deeper consideration of dictionaries.

Well, that about wraps it up for the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary

I found a nice critique of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary in one of the reviews on Amazon. It's by Daniel Pratt, a lexicographer and mathematician who placed second in the first national Scrabble tournament in 1978. He also developed the rating system used for Scrabble players in tournaments. It was around the same time that the first Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was created. Pratt is therefore well qualified for making such a critique.

One of his strongest points is something that I had begun to suspect: The OSPD adds new words when they appear in dictionaries, but does not delete old words once they become obscure enough to not appear in modern dictionaries:

The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) is a compilation of words from twelve U.S. college dictionaries from the last four decades. Four are still in print and, as the descendants of seven of the others, contain most but by no means all of their contributions. As a result, pronunciations, etymologies, and full definitions are no longer available for many entries, especially those found only in the source that has been out of print for a quarter century. NSA members like to twitter that they don't play your grandmother's Scrabble, but in many respects they're using her dictionary. It's a shame they can't bring the game into the 21st century.

He also points out some of the most ridiculous entries, but the word that sticks out most in my mind is one that was pointed out elsewhere: "AARRGHH" is listed in the OSPD, like it is an actual word.


Ammon Shea takes a different position. After reading the entire Oxford English Dictionary (which feat he documented in his book, Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages), he describes returning to Scrabble for the first time in many years and how he finds that the list of allowed words no longer makes sense to him:

Why, for instance, does the Scrabble Players Dictionary list both howf and howff (Scottish words defined as ‘a place frequently visited’), but neglects to include many of the variants that Joseph Wright has in his English Dialect Dictionary, such as houf, hauf, hofe, hoff, houf, houck? I tried to play swad (a bumpkin, or fat person), which appears in most of the dictionaries I own, on three different occasions before I remembered that the Scrabble game wouldn’t recognize it.

He then goes on to observe:

Some complain that the Scrabble Players Dictionary is too inclusive; I find the opposite to be true. Rather than only let in some of the strange words, they should have opened the floodgates and allowed them all. It has become a game of memory, rather than a game of language.

Clearly, you can't please everybody.

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In response to comments on his review, Pratt recommends several replacement dictionaries - the American Heritage College Dictionary, the American Heritage High School Dictionary, the New Oxford American Dictionary, and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary - with a discussion of the advantages of each.

An article about the makers of Bananagrams

The Boston Globe has published a nice article about the invention of Bananagrams, giving more details than I have ever previous encountered, a photograph of the Nathansons (the family that invented the game four years ago), and quotes from Abe Nathanson himself.

The article describes how different family members contributed to different aspects of Bananagrams and how many of the details of gameplay were developed by Abe while working on his own over the course of almost a year.

Abe's aversion to the big retailers and the way they do business is the reason that Bananagrams is not sold at stores such as Toys R Us or Wal-Mart. Similarly, the Nathansons have no interest in selling the rights to Bananagrams to any of the big toy companies. Their success in independently developing a game from concept to best-selling juggernaut makes for an interesting story.

The last paragraph of the article is a hint about future directions of the company:

"We're almost at the point where we have more money than we need," says Nathanson, adding that he's drawing the line at creating any more fruit games. Bananagrams will always be the gold standard, he says, "and we don't want to kill a good idea."

So, no more new fruit-based games. Next up: Cabbagegrams! Lettuce Play! Beet, Don't Fail Me Now!

Bananagrams on Twitter

October 2011 Update (superseding the original post which is below): The official Bananagrams Twitter account has changed from _BANANAGRAMS_ to bananagrams.

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Large Animal Games, the makers of the iPhone and Facebook version of Bananagrams, has been been posting updates on Twitter as bananagrams since early 2009. (The first post is here.)

I occasionally post Bananagrams-related things under the Twitter alias bananagrammer.

And now, there is an official Twitter feed for Bananagrams:

_BANANAGRAMS_

_BANANAGRAMS_ has started posting "Weords", a term introduced in the Bananagrams book, meaning "weird words that are cool to play". It seems like it will be a useful account to follow. I am looking forward to future posts.

On the effect of body orientation on anagramming speed

When we are standing up, gravity pulls blood down which is detected by "baroreceptors" in the circulatory system. The circulatory system compensates by increasing the heard rate, so that blood pressure in the upper body is maintained. When the baroreceptors register such a blood pressure drop, the locus coeruleus neurons become more active. The locus coeruleus responds to stress by increasing release of norepinephrine (a.k.a., noradrenaline). This has a number of effects, including increasing heart rate and blood flow and boosting motivation, thinking, and alertness. But researchers have found that increases in norepinephrine coincide with a slight slowing of certain kinds of thinking.

The thesis is that "insight problems", the kind where your brain kind of wanders and does background processing, and then suddenly presents a solution in an "A-ha!" moment, happen faster when you have lower norepinephrine levels. A simple "A-ha"-type problem to test, and one which is very popular in psychological research, is anagramming.

In one experiment [M.P. Walker, C. Liston, J.A. Hobson, R. Stickgold, "Cognitive flexibility across the sleep-wake cycle: REM-sleep enhancement of anagram problem solving", Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 14, p.317-324 (2002)], researchers woke people up at different stages of sleep and asked them to solve anagrams. They found that subjects who had just been in REM sleep were better at anagramming than subjects who had been in some other sleep stage. And REM sleep has a lower locus coeruleus activity level.

In another experiment, [D. M. Lipnicki and D. G. Byrne, Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 24, p.719-722 (2005)], researchers had subjects solve 5-letter anagrams (like unscrambling DEFSU to get FUSED) and perform arithmetic problems (73 - 58 + 19 - 26 = ?), while standing up and then while lying down. When standing up, average anagramming time was 29.4s +/- 6.3s. When lying down, average anagramming time was 26.3s +/- 5.4s. The difference in anagramming times (3.1 seconds) is smaller than the standard deviation of the data, but the statistical analysis suggests that the error bars are not that important, allowing us to conclude that the average person in the study anagrammed 10% faster while lying down.

A similar test found that standing is correlated with people solving simple arithmetic problems a few percent faster, but it's such a small difference that it doesn't seem statistically significant.

Summarizing: When you stand up, your body tends to become more alert and less relaxed, and you may anagram slightly slower as a consequence.

Caveats: This study was performed on randomly selected subjects with no proclivity for word games. When given 32 5-letter anagrams to solve, and 45 seconds to solve each in, the average number of solutions was 8 or 9 (whether sitting or standing). A typical Bananagrams player would do significantly better, I would be willing to bet.

I wonder if the cause and effect might flow the other way: if lower blood pressure allows one to anagram faster, can focusing on anagramming cause blood pressure to be temporarily lowered? Or will it just cause one to lie down?

Anagramming is only one of the skills used in playing word games, of course. The kind of concentration necessary to play Bananagrams fast most likely requires the mind to not be in a relaxed state. (And what I'd really like to see is a study on playing Bananagrams itself). Still, whenever the professional Bananagrams league launches, one of the first drugs they should consider regulating is beta-andrenoceptor antagonist propranolol.

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Further reading:

D. M. Lipnicki and D. G. Byrne, "Thinking on your back: Solving anagrams faster when supine than when standing", Cognitive Brain Research, Volume 24, p.719-722 (2005).

If you have access to it through your library, you can get the paper from here.