11 ms·
Square Theory
- lisper 1y agoAargh! I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste. > Jet black/Jet Blue ... catnap/dognap My favorite examples are how prepositions can change the meanings of idioms. For example, to be "down for" something and "down with" something mean the same thing, but to be "down on" something means the opposite. (And going down to X means something very, very different from going down on X. That last example is also interesting from a geeky HN point of view because the preposition imposes a type constraint on the binding of X, which is why I had to use "X" instead of "something" :-)
- robinhouston 1y ago> I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste. That's much less true than it used to be! I don't know what device you're using, but on my iPhone I can seamlessly copy the text from that image.
- bee_rider 1y agoDown for lunch? Down with lunch! (Breakfast food is yummier).
- kps 1y ago> I hate it when people quote text as images because it makes it impossible to cut and paste. Yes. In this case the text is in the ALT tag, which would help if browsers exposed it.
- teach 1y agoAnd "down for" something is very nearly synonymous with "up for" something. (:
- keeganpoppen 1y agowhat a lovely Baader-Meinhof for Ricki Heicklen's delightful "Unparalleled Misalignments", which showed up on HN not too long ago!
- lblume 1y agohttps://rickiheicklen.com/unparalleled-misalignments.html https://rickiheicklen.com/unparalleled-misalignments.html
- aleph_minus_one 1y ago> what a lovely Baader-Meinhof Which attractive terrorists?
- Aachen 1y agoIt's a cryptographic mechanism that allows you to see what was there in plain sight the whole time. Merkle-Dåmgard, Diffie-Hellman, cryptographic mechanisms are often named like this
- kens 1y agoThe link to the HN discussion, by the way, is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43891128
- jakupovic 1y agoThis is pretty cool. I wonder what logic/math describes it?
- BoiledCabbage 1y agoWhile it doesn't fully describe it, his category theory diagram reference seems relevant to me. The stricter of the squares seem to be a homomorphism. But the "looser" ones which don't "preserve structure" after the transformation but "find a new structure" are some of the more interesting ones.
- AaronAPU 1y agoSemantic Bayesian hyper-graphs where each of the percepts have strong correlation between each other. I’d argue you could bind them tighter by giving the corners strong relationships to each other as well. We find these sorts of dense correlations pleasing because it’s the natural way we discover meaning. Even though in this case the meaning is fairly superficial.
- oliwary 1y ago> If you’ve ever tried to construct a crossword, you’ll find that the framing of a crossword grid under square theory feels right. When you’re nearing the end of the grid-filling process, finding valid crossings of words to fill that final corner of a grid, there’s a satisfying “clicking” feeling—a sense of magic—when it all fits together, analogous to the wrapping-around feeling of completing the square. If you enjoy this feeling, I think you would like my word game https://spaceword.org https://spaceword.org. The goal is to arrange 21 letters in a square that is as tight as possible. No one has achieved a "perfect" pattern yet, but people are very close, often leaving only 3 spaces blank!
- JoshTriplett 1y agoDo you have a version of spaceword that's not a "daily" game? I'd be interested in trying it if so.
- oliwary 1y agoThere is a weekly mode with 63 letters, thinking of adding a monthly mode as well. Or would you prefer puzzles that are always open?
- JoshTriplett 1y agoPuzzles that are always open is exactly what I mean, yeah. Some "daily" games call this kind of generated puzzle a "practice" mode. But whenever I encounter a daily game, I go straight for that mode, which is what most games would just present as the game itself.
- oliwary 1y agoFair enough! :) I'll look into adding a practice mode.
- JoshTriplett 1y agoThank you very much! I really appreciate it and look forward to trying it!
- kelseyfrog 1y agoI'm a big fan of killing time on long drives with friendly word games. One of my favorites is a mix between rhyming and square theory. Here's how it works: one player picks two words that rhyme perfectly. Then, for each of those words, they choose a clue word, usually a synonym, but any kind of related word is fair game. They say those two clue words out loud, and the other players have to guess the original rhyming pair. What makes it fun is trying to reverse-engineer the original rhyme from the clues. It's like solving a little logic puzzle. It's easy to come up with new puzzles, but cracking them can be surprisingly tricky. Still, the structure gives just enough to keep it solvable most of the time. 1. Somewhat described here https://bestlifeonline.com/jeopardy-rhyme-time-opera-version-clue/ https://bestlifeonline.com/jeopardy-rhyme-time-opera-version... It's actually quite difficult to find a description of the category many of us are already familiar with.
- cooperaustinj 1y agoDo you know any unfriendly word games I can try?
- kelseyfrog 1y agoYou could add the additional constraint that the words have to insult the guesser based on their unique psychological vulnerabilities. Hope that helps!
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- stronglikedan 1y agoPerhaps give the Argument Clinic a call.
- hypertexthero 1y agoFYI https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_Clinic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_Clinic
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- joshhug 1y agoThe part about dad joke square theory got me thinking about this classic scarecrow joke, which feels like an example from some higher order version of square theory: "Why was the scarecrow given an award?" "He was out standing in his field." The fact that a scarecrow's job is to be "out standing in his field", and that excelling at one's job can be phrased as being "outstanding in his field" is an incredible linguistic coincidence.
- cdkmoose 1y agoAlso, My friend accidentally drank a bottle of invisible ink... she's at the hospital now, waiting to be seen. "Waiting to be seen" having slightly different meaning with respect to hospitals and invisible ink.
- genewitch 1y agoIn 1903 there was a proposal to inter corpses into crystal caskets. The success of that initiative remains to be seen. Is what you reminded me of. Technically first it was "fuckin' Mitch!" Because Hedburg sprayed reappearing disappearing ink on someone's shirt.
- simianparrot 1y agoFor some reason this old saying popped into my head reading that. I know it's not related but: Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
- yojo 1y agoMy favorite part about that quote is the broken symmetry between the double meaning of the second sentence and the single meaning of the first. It begs one to consider the possibility of little “time flies” snacking on arrows. Which I guess completes the square?
- anyfoo 1y agoGosh, after all those years I've only just realized the double meaning of "fruit flies". Thanks! Before that, I just thought it was more of a non sequitur, but still amusing. There was just something inherently funny about imagining a banana hurling through the air in an awkward tumbling motion, right after the sagely abstract concept of time and its elegant arrow metaphor.
- winwang 1y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_diagram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commutative_diagram
- noqc 1y agoCommutative diagrams are to these squares what category theory is to analogy.
- Garlef 1y agoI think Double Categories [1] would be a more appropriate setting: In a double category, the vertical and horizontal arrows are of different types. In usual commutative diagrams, they are of the same type. [1]: https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/double+category https://ncatlab.org/nlab/show/double+category
- ogogmad 1y agoWhy don't some phrases arrive at the same meaning? They don't commute.
- SamBam 1y agoThis is clever, and I want to spend some more time thinking about it. In a sense, I think this is basically saying that you can put the standard SAT-style analogy questions ("Lumen : Brightness = Inches : Length") in a square, and that most crossword clues could be represented as weird SAT analogies. Or maybe I'm stretching the analogy. But I think that the "Diagonal" that the author suggests for the connection between "Donkey" and "Elephant" and "Party" isn't quite correct. The key is that both the Donkey and the Elephant are a "Party Animal." You can't ignore the "Animal" part, it describes them: they are each the animal that represents their party, the "party animal." I'm not sure the correct way to represent this in "Square Theory," but it's not just linking "Party" to the animal in question.
- varjag 1y agoLeibnitz once famously said, "Music is the pleasure the human mind experiences from counting without being aware that it is counting". Perhaps solving crosswords is the pleasure mind experiences from doing group theory.
- wttdotm 1y agoIn "The Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat," there's a chapter where Oliver Sacks makes a similar argument about music stemming from the case of two autistic twins who couldn't do arithmetic but played a game with each other where they named increasingly large primes. Basically says that music/harmony is a kind of innate appreciation of the numerical relationship between sounds, much like naming primes is an appreciation of the _lack_ of a numerical relationship between numbers. The experience of a resonance between two different things (frequencies, numbers, and in this blog's case words) can exist extremely strongly outside of the ability to operate on those things in the first place. Interesting read.
- vanderZwan 1y agoI've read that music and dancing memory is mainly handled in the cerebellum, which is separate from many other types of memory. This is also theorized to mostly explain why playing familiar music can help "stabilize" people with dementia who otherwise feel lost (funny enough also something Sacks has talked about[0]), because the cerebellum is typically less affected than the neocortex by whatever process is causing the brain to break down. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLEr-zP3fc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8HLEr-zP3fc
- KolibriFly 1y agoThere's something deeply satisfying about making all the pieces fit under a hidden set of rules
- falcor84 1y agoThis brings to mind the classic article "Explanation as Orgasm" [0]. [0] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008290415597 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A:1008290415597
- cshimmin 1y agoMy favorite example, which was an honest translation error from a non-native speaker friend: Hand job (he meant to say manual labor)
- lubujackson 1y agoHeard from a non-native speaker watching a missed basket in a basketball game: "Another rim job!"
- zahlman 1y agoSomething similar once famously happened with a Japanese vtuber: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeQ5K5DQiDI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeQ5K5DQiDI
- emmelaich 1y agoTo save everyone a click .. it was 'handjob' for 'handwriting'
- keepamovin 1y agoI think in Chinese this is literal for hand made (手工) - the gong 2nd character can also mean work or job I think - but the sex term of art I guess is different there. Haha
- tclancy 1y agoThere’s a joke in The Jerk that uses this same intentional misunderstanding.
- nojonestownpls 1y agoI've also heard people jokingly call manicures handjobs.
- paulddraper 1y agoThere are a number of comedic sketches based on the linguistic similarity of "booty call" and "butt dial."
- munificent 1y agoWhat a lovely post. The "Grubhub" square fits some other alternatives: "Grubclub", "Bitesite", or "Eatmeet" (but eww).
- dleeftink 1y agoKind of exciting to see Algirdas Greimas' semiotic square derived from (game) first principles! [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_square https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiotic_square
- gowld 1y ago> However, there’s nothing about the square structure that dictates the edges must represent phrases and synonyms. I got there and thought "Category theory", and, lo, that's the next paragraph. > Let’s talk about Scrabble, one of the seven most important games [link to review of Seven Games book] https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/books/review/seven-games-oliver-roeder.html https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/25/books/review/seven-games-... Seven Games was mentioned in another HN discussion last week, by 'danvk talking about his Boggle solution: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44084022 HN hasn't yet taken an interest in that: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=%22seven%20games%22&sort=byPopularity&type=story https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
- rossant 1y agoSame. I couldn't help seeing a commutative diagram before he had a chance to say "category theory".
- mellosouls 1y agoNice article! It feels like there should be something AI-zeitgeist-related in there referencing word2vec or similar. OT: Going by the url, link here on HN and slightly adjacenty vibe I got to the bottom and signature before realizing this wasn't Shtetl-Optimized finally made mobile-friendly.
- jacksnipe 1y agoWordcels discover category theory lol
- pwdisswordfishz 1y agoCategory theory has always been a wordcel concept.
- bitcurious 1y agoI came up with a (lambda? Triangle?) loop a few days ago. Read until sleepy. Sleep until ready.
- underyx 1y agoThe author of this post would love the video game Lingo: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1814170/Lingo/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/1814170/Lingo/
- astrolx 1y agoHow can someone hate "étui" so bad !?
- tclancy 1y agoDo a million crosswords and find out. Accepting Crosswordese is the process one pays for the hobby.
- RupertEisenhart 1y agoGreat article, but I can't believe it didn't mention the sator square! SATOR AREPO TENET OPERA ROTAS (Very easy to commit to memory too since most of the letters are right there in the name!)
- scubbo 1y agoGNU Terry Pratchett
- zem 1y agoone of my favourite english curiosities follows this structure - "outgoing" and "retiring" are both perfect antonyms (enjoying or not enjoying socializing) and perfect synonyms (leaving a political office or job)
- nssnsjsjsjs 1y agoFun read. As they say in New York, Arigato!
- geodel 1y agoHuge fun. Besides mixing/matching like this I mix across languages and that give an extra dimension to create such fun phrases.
- akoboldfrying 1y agoGrubHub is certainly a good name, but if I came across an app actually named "Food Central-Place" I would have no choice but to install it on the spot. It just has a certain anti-ring to it.
- AStonesThrow 1y agoNext time you're in NYC, try searching the web for "Thai Food Near Me"! https://www.thaifoodnearmenyc.com/ https://www.thaifoodnearmenyc.com/ There was a local food-truck operator named "Phở King" and eventually they established a storefront ... well, I see one closed, and another opened up. Formerly known as "Phở King Kitchen" and now there's the "Phở King Eggroll" place. Fred Armisen did an SNL bit about this, too. Not far from me, there is a ghost kitchen cluster. It's tucked away in a commercially-zoned neigborhood, and it serves all the food delivery services. Apparently, you can walk in too. I only accidentally patronized them once, when they had some great larb on offer. I think the report says there's 15 different menus and "virtual kitchens" in the building, just turning out food-to-go.
- ehonsey33 1y agoA matrix is a matrix, namely two triangles reflected about a diagonal. No wonder they are frequently used in computer science and general problem-solving ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- noirchen 1y agoThis reminds me of the so-called "heartless couplet" (无情对) in Chinese. Every pair of words in the couplets are synonymous or anonymous, and yet the meanings of the couplets are completely unrelated, often in a humorous way.
- andriamanitra 1y agoThe obvious question to ask is could you take it to the third dimension and make a cube out of double-doubles? What about other shapes, perhaps a pyramid or a tetrahedron? Squares are simple enough that it's still easy to come up with examples, but I think a graph with higher edges-to-vertices ratio would be even more satisfying.
- rlonn 1y agoIf any good frontend/mobile devs here like crosswords, I need a good frontend for picture crossword designer/generator https://crosswordcomputer.com https://crosswordcomputer.com
- KolibriFly 1y agoDefinitely gonna be mentally yelling "THAT'S A SQUARE" every time I see a clever pun or a satisfyingly constructed theme from now on
- vanderZwan 1y ago> But here’s what I think makes squares special: a square is the simplest polygon that has non-adjacent sides. In a triangle, each side is adjacent to the other two sides. But in a square, opposite sides have no points in common, which makes any connection between them feel surprising, like a coincidence. In pentagons and beyond, this still holds, but the extra sides add complexity that make them feel slightly less elegant. Nevertheless, other shapes can be interesting too, but I see them as the exception, not the rule. I bet that you could fit the "clever bits" of writing of quite a few literary classics into more complex shapes. Especially when it's the ons that only people who really like literary classics like. Like, say, a story with five main characters who all turn out to be connected in one way like how one might create a five-pointed star with one piece of string and five push-pins, and in a completely different unrelated way like a pentagon made by the same arrangement of push-pins.
- idk1 1y agoThis feels a little over blown, but on the other hand, you've got to have an angle and I think this is the right angle.
- Thorrez 1y agoSomething similar is going on with https://xkcd.com/1645/ https://xkcd.com/1645/ . They even both mention platonic solids: >Platonic solids for my real friends and real solids for my platonic friends!
- mikhailfranco 1y agoThis is not surprising at all if you know: 1. Cryptic crosswords (1920s) - the only interesting crosswords. 2. "Metaphors We Live By" Lakoff & Johnson (1980), or perhaps just "Roget's Thesaurus" (1805) long before that (synonyms, antonyms), and obviously homonyms. 3. A little bit of Category Theory, but not too much, just the amount that occurs to you after 1 & 2. An alternative entry point might be knowledge graphs (1990s).