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![\"Grain](\"\/eggs\/images\/grain-group-word-search.gif\")
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I generally liken RE to an extraordinarily complex, or just tedious, puzzle. This is a more straightforward puzzle. <\/p>\n
Task: Find 6 strings of characters. What strings? I wasn’t sure exactly. Lesser word searches explicitly tell you which words to find. Those puzzles can be solved via a brute force algorithm that most of us figure out by the age of 5. I knew that these had to be coherent English words. Eventually, I re-read the instructions and noticed that the words were supposed to pertain to “foods made from grain”. Lesson: Gather all the intelligence you can before delving into the meat of the puzzle.<\/p>\n
Next, there is domain knowledge. I have done a few word search puzzles before and so I know that I am supposed to look for strings of characters running left -> right, right -> left, top -> bottom, bottom -> top, and also diagonally. And I have some clue about foods made from grain. So I am off.<\/p>\n
Then, I started theorizing about how the original puzzler (or whatever you call a person who develops puzzles) must have put this puzzle together. Since there are 6 words, I hypothesized that 2 would be horizontal (one for each direction), 2 would be vertical (again, one for each direction), and 2 would be diagonal. This would make good use of the parameters of a stock word search. I refined my initial search using these assumptions.<\/p>\n
I was correct about the 2 horizontal and 2 vertical. I also found one more horizontal word. I methodically scanned every diagonal possibility, much to the disdain of my overworked eyes. I could not find any word on that orientation. So I revised my original assumption and assumed the remaining word must also be horizontal.<\/p>\n