GoKawiilInformation theory · word games
The number nobody knows
Sometimes the medium and the message have a more complicated relationship than expected. “B as in Bravo.” You’ve done it: spelling a word down a bad phone line, reaching past the letters for whole words, because B and D and P all blur into the same mush the moment the line frays.
That is not a quirk of bad reception. It is one of the deepest ideas in modern communication, performed by a human in real time, the same trick that keeps a spacecraft’s signal legible across millions of kilometres of noise. Marshall McLuhan gets the credit for the medium is the message, but Claude Shannon had beaten him to a colder version of it years earlier: to a machine moving your words, the meaning doesn’t matter at all; only the medium does, and which of its signals can be told apart. Bravo and Delta survive a bad line; B and D don’t. You sorted that out by ear, without a flicker of thought. Push the same instinct to its limit (how much can you force through a noisy channel and still be understood with perfect certainty?) and you walk straight into a question Shannon posed in 1956.
I didn’t arrive there as a mathematician; I’m not one. I came from the other direction entirely: I was trying to build a word game that uses deduction instead of clues. Something I expected to be simple.
Let me tell you how the seemingly simplest thing I’ve ever shipped turned out to be balanced on one of the oldest open problems there is.
The “simple” thing
Here is the whole game. A half-finished crossword grid. A queue of letters waiting to be placed. You’re served a letter, you tap the cell it belongs in, and you keep going until the grid is full.
One rule
The thing I wanted out of it seemed almost too small to bother stating: the puzzle should never make you guess. No moment where you’ve done everything right, the logic runs dry, and the game just wants you to pick a cell and hope. Every letter placeable by reasoning alone.
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