Congratulations! That is an awesome example.

A theory is only valid until it has been disproven, and I do believe you have done it.

I withdraw the theory that a human could not have designed a deck of cards consisting of a 7×7 grid of ambigrams worthy of game play. The legibility of your designs certainly makes it worthy of game play, and proof that a human is indeed up to the task of selecting the words to create a playable deck.

It also is further proof that word selection is the critical component in the designing of such a deck, and you did a great job at selecting the initial words (even if it does use one of the techniques of “cheating” that I wrote about where a human could specifically select words that have the same basic repeating patterns to minimize the size of the task).

Is it optimal? Who knows. Would it be “playable”? Yes, and that was the ultimate goal.

I suppose the original claim should have gone into further detail. I didn’t actually expect so much “analysis” of the wording, as it was primarily an announcement about the game.

I should have just stated that a human could not have done what the computer did, and left it at that.

For example:

• The computer had no restrictions on the letter set (the original set of cards considered all letters as being “in play”).
• There was no restrictions on the length of the words (the original deck had words of any length “in play”, and ended up selecting words that had lengths of both 5 and 6 letters in the final set)
• Finally, there were no restrictions that all ambigrams had to contain just one-to-one inversions (the original set selected many assymetric pairings)

.

I still maintain that without the constraints that bound the challenge, the task does become “almost impossible” for a human, but I will admit that even with a restricted word set, restricted word length and restricted pairings (all one-to-one), a human CAN perform the word selection for a deck very worthy of game play, and ultimately, that was the goal.

So, nice job! We’ll drop the claim so we can all move on with our lives.

Read the relevant blog post: http://dahtamnay.blogspot.com/2009/08/77-ambigram-grid.html
or take a look at my solution:
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_DeKUngBeIy8/Sn65nWEb7LI/AAAAAAAAAGI/7P5xFurFCI4/s1600-h/7×7.png

Yes, the original claim was that the deck would be practically impossible for a human. Yes, the elaboration was that it would have been impossible a few years ago (even for a computer). BOTH of these refer to the word selection.

As I’ve stated at least 3 times now, the ambigram creation has been possible for 10 years. The word selection has not.

Word selection was the claim from the very first paragraph. Yes, I did not go into detail in the first paragraph, but that’s the way writing works! You make the general claim up front, and then go into details further on.

Kevin tried to disprove the claim that word selection matters by asking for a set of 8 random words that he would then create an ambigram grid from. He actually did a pretty good job (better than I expected) and I have already given him props several times here. However, he ended up actually further proving the point (even if it was just with the SAVOT design) that word selection actually IS important, and is the key to making an ambigram grid work (or any ambigram, for that matter).

He proved the argument that with a set of random words, there will always be one (or more) designs that don’t match up well, and that finding a set of 7 words match up well actually pretty important.

The claim has not changed, the argument has not changed, and the only reason the focus got off track at all is that some commentators on this page kept steering the conversation to focus on the design of the ambigrams instead of word selection.

That’s the claim that Kevin responded to (that no human could have made a comparable Ambigram deck); it says nothing about word selection and word selection isn’t mentioned until several paragraphs later. It’s pretty clear that Kevin was responding only to the ability to make ambigrams out of an arbitrary word list, and that Editor agreed (at least before Kevin did it) that doing so was a reasonable response to the claim he’d made. It wasn’t until Kevin completed what was supposed to take lifetimes in 3 days that Editor decided that picking easily flipable words was the salient point, not designing a 7×7 set of ambigrams; if that was the important point he should have pointed that out before going along with Kevin’s challenge. Apparently the wording of the article confused even its author.

However, I still don’t quite understand where the claim was *not* clear. It was in the original article, and we have been discussing it for the entire length of this page.

Thank you for making it clearer, but no thank you for insisting it always was clear.

I definitely don’t see what you’re seeing.

The first “joker” card says “Jgker”? Honestly? That second letter is a “g”?

Wow.

The last “joker” says “Jakey”?

How do you see an “a” as the second letter there.

Are you *trying* to misread these?

And your “Fingel” and “Anger” mis-readings both start with the same character! It can’t be both.

That’s only halfway through your list, but I’ll stop there. I’ve seen enough.

Anyway, I’m done.

I have stated my theory, and until it is disproven, I stand behind it. Here is the simple form of the theory:

“A computer can do word selection for a complex 7×7 ambigram grid more efficiently than a human.”

.?.?..? Yarn, Leabn, Leary
?.???.. Aeink, Arink, Ariok, Arink
……. (none)
?.?.?.? Jgker, Jokgr, Jokeb, Jakey
.?.???? Qnger, Onger, Fingel, Finges, Anger
..????? Firen, Siker, Siged, Sing, Sirey
.?.???? Killid, Kiyer, Kijlen, Hitler, Killey

Of course, I admit I probably underrated my field performance and overestimated the rate of mistakes here.