12/30/2023 0 Comments Nyt spelling bee queen bee![]() ![]() Hopefully now I’m prepared for when this happens again, as it surely will. I got the problem fixed before I had to start work for the day, but it was a close thing. ![]() So, instead of working on my novel, I added a message of apology to the site and set to work. With dawning horror, I realized that, while I did have all the day’s correct solutions in my database, my solver, confused by the identical letter set, was offering players the solution from July 8 instead. Unfortunately, I had several messages waiting from folks letting me know that my solver’s solution set for the day was not getting them all the way to Queen Bee status. I woke up early this morning, as usual, intending to get an hour or two of writing done before work. Not only that, but they did it barely five weeks after the original version had appeared! The diabolical twist that really caused me such a headache was that the solution set for today included just ONE EXTRA WORD that had been disallowed in the previous incarnation of the puzzle, increasing the number of acceptable answers from 26 answers to 27. On this day of infamy, August 13, 2020, the Spelling Bee editors for the first time repeated a previous puzzle using the exact same center letter as before. Because early this morning my nightmare scenario came true. But I knew it would also take time and hard effort, so I kept putting it off. In the back of my mind I knew I needed to shore things up against that eventuality. I wasn’t sure my solver would know the right way to handle this situation. There was one problem in particular that I knew might crop up one day but had not yetwhat would happen if the editors ever decided to repeat one specific puzzle, hive, center letter and all. Enough people use it that I’m fanatical about correcting any problems as soon as inhumanly possible. Gradually other players found it, and it now attracts more users to my site than even my manuscript formatting guide. ![]() Over time I kept tinkering with my solver, adding new features, automating others, and generally sprucing up the layout. The pangram will be the same as before, but the differing center letter means there will still be some new words to find in the solution set. What keeps this from being too repetitive is that the designated center letter will be different. Sometimes other words, which may have been deemed too obscure or unintentionally offensive, will make the reverse migration to the blacklist.Īnother thing the editors do with some frequency is to repeat a set of seven letters (or “hive”) after it has already appeared in the Bee. Sometimes a word that the editors once deemed unacceptable, such as “ annal,” will suddenly end up whitelisted after much lobbying from the Bee community. You’ll find endless examples of this exercise in the comments section of the Times Wordplay blog, or under the #spellingbee hashtag on Twitter. For some people, part of the fun and frustration of the Bee is arguing online about words that weren’t accepted in the puzzle but should have been, or that were accepted and shouldn’t have been. All this was in service to my quest to achieve “Queen Bee” statusmeaning that you have found every answer that the Times deems acceptable.īecause that’s the other thing about the Beeeach day’s puzzle comes with a definitive list of acceptable answers. ![]() Before long I’d started building a little web tool to help me find solutions to the puzzle when I got stuck. I starting playing the Spelling Bee in the fall of 2018, and I quickly became fascinated with it. One letter is designated as the “center,” and that letter must appear in all the solutions. There’s always at least one wordthe “pangram”that uses all seven letters. The New York Times Spelling Bee is a daily online puzzle that presents a set of seven letters and challenges players to construct as many words as possible using them. ![]()
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