Sunday, June 05, 2011

transformations

Transforming one thing into another is no longer the sole province of Jesus or the Transformation teachers at the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. You can do this, too. Take a four-letter word and change it, one letter at a time, into a new "destination" word. Don't add or subtract any letters (i.e., no 3- or 5-letter words), and avoid using proper nouns, curse words, acronyms, and abbreviations. Rare words are fine, as long as they're searchable in a standard dictionary or encyclopedia.

Change DOGS to CATS!

DOGS
COGS
COTS
CATS

That was easy. Let's go Taoist, and change FIRE to SOIL.

FIRE
FILE
BILE
BOLE
BOLL
BOIL
SOIL

And now for some Western alchemy, as we change LEAD to GOLD:

LEAD
LEAN
LOAN
LOAD
GOAD
GOLD

Ha ha! Too simple. And now for a transformation that'll give many hope: let's change UGLY to SEXY!

UGLY
AGLY
ALLY
ALLS
AILS
MILS
MILL
WILL
WILT
TILT
TINT
TENT
TEXT
SEXT (see also here)
SEXY

Damn... that was harder than it looked, and it took a ton of research. A bit like trying to beautify someone through plastic surgery.

One last one: let's go biological and transform RICE into POOP.

RICE
RACE
PACE
PALE
POLE
POLL
POOL
POOP

That took all of thirty seconds. I wish my actual poops were that brief.

Feel free to use the comments section to perform your own magical transformations.


_

10 comments:

  1. Just want you to know that I am working on one of these in my spare time (you know, all that time I have lying around these days). Right now I'm stuck, and I suspect it might not be possible, but I'm not giving up yet.

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  2. Sounds like a challenge! Care to share, or is this one of those things where you'd prefer to go it alone?

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  3. I think I'm going to try to puzzle it out a little longer on my own, but if I fail to make any progress I will yield to superior intellects.

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  4. Then you won't be seeking my help, that's for sure. Luckily, there are a few Beeg Braynes who frequent this humble blog.

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  5. Yay, I have succeeded! Er, maybe.

    Anyway: from GOOD to EVIL in 13 easy steps... (notes in parentheses)

    GOOD
    GOAD
    TOAD
    TRAD(1)
    TRAM
    CRAM
    CRAN(2)
    BRAN
    BRAD(3)
    ORAD(4)
    ORAL
    OVAL
    EVAL(5)
    EVIL

    Notes:

    (1) Not an abbreviation, but a British term for traditional jazz revived in the 1950s
    (2) A unit of capacity measure fresh herring (37.5 gallons)
    (3) Not the name, but the brass fastener used to hold papers together
    (4) Toward the mouth or oral region
    (5) This one's the kicker, really: it is an obsolete word meaning "relating to time or duration," but if it is not allowed, this chain is impossible--it is the only word that can be made from "evil" with a single letter change, at least according to dictionary.com.

    So, there. I did it, and I am going to tentatively call it a success and await a ruling.

    As I was doing this, I realized it would be far easier to write a program to do this, as long as I had access to a dictionary file (i.e., a list of valid words). I guess I still have some programmer blood in me after all.

    (It's also interesting to see how close "love" and "hate" are...)

    And since we're playing with words, here's my word verification challenge: "tokkedly"

    No idea what it is supposed to mean, but I'm going to try to work it into conversation somehow. (It sounds like a bad pronunciation of "doggedly," actually. Maybe we can follow Korean conventions on consonant sound variations and make it a "stronger" version of "doggedly.")

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  6. Somehow I knew that "GOOD to EVIL" was going to be the transformation: I tried that one myself last night before giving up and going to sleep. During my struggle, I thought to myself, "You know-- this is probably the very transformation Charles is working on, given how hard it is to get from one end to the other. Should I publicly guess at this in the comment thread, thereby stealing his fire?" And just as quickly: "Nah."-- a defeatist reaction caused by my lack of success at forming a similar chain. Private failure was bad enough; had I guessed wrong, I'd have added public failure to my problems.

    As for a ruling: YOU'VE DONE IT! Congratulations.

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  7. Hooray!

    I figured, knowing me and knowing you (to quote ABBA), that you would not have too hard a time guessing what I was working on. I also wondered if you had tried it yourself, but obviously I could not ask without spilling the beans.

    I ended up working on this from both ends--I actually started with EVIL because I knew it was going to be the tough end. Then it was a matter of stitching the ends together, which ended up being harder than I had thought it would be. I had gotten all the way to DRAT from GOOD, with an alternate tree leading to CRAN, and from EVIL I had originally gone to UDAL. But it was the discovery of ORAD that ended up solving the puzzle, allowing me to use BRAD. My original solve was actually 16 steps; from TRAM I had gone GRAM-GRAB-CRAB-CRAN, but then I realized that CRAM would substitute for all four. I would be interested in hearing where your efforts took you and where you got stuck.

    Lovely mental exercise, and an excellent diversion from the Dis... which I must of course now get back to.

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  8. I worked from both ends as well. Alas, I did this inside the edit window of the "post a comment" function, so when I gave up and closed that window, I lost my work.

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