Can you unscramble the words in the title of this famous book? Then you can read this "bkoo." Reading a bkoo is not only fun, like solving a puzzle, but it also improves your ability to unscramble words and score higher in your favorite word games. The letters of each word in this book have been sorted alphabetically into what is called an "alphagram." Some alphagrams correspond to more than one English word, as you can see in the table below. Alphagram: English translation(s). bkoo: book. below: bowel below elbow. ghhottu: thought. aehrstt: threats shatter hatters. To anagram any set of letters, simply sort them and lookup the corresponding entry in an Alphagram-English table (also called an "anagram dictionary") like the one above. This is significantly faster than considering all permutations of the letters, e.g., there are 120 permutations of the letters b-e-l-o-w and 2,520 of a-e-h-r-s-t-t. The thesis of this book is that Alphagram is a language (albeit more like Pig Latin than any natural language) that can be read, and whoever can read Alphagram can instantly spot anagrams. To learn Alphagram, we propose reading this bkoo of 27,405 words, including 2,576 distinct words. (To play this many words in Scrabble(R) would take a typical player thirty-five years at one game per week!) While reading the first chapter is challenging, afterwards you will find it reads like a classic translated into a familiar language. Several factors ease the learning curve: 1.Answers. Each page has answers on the back. 2.Context. It is much easier to find anagrams in context. For instance, "addelnnorW" is much easier to decipher after uncovering that it follows "Alice in...." 3.Repetition. Consider, for example, the word "thought," which occurs 74 times in Alice in Wonderland. The first time you encounter "ghhottu," it may take a while to unscramble (even with context), but later occurences are easier as you naturally learn the language. oS ist abck, aelrx, adn ejnoy eht bkoo!
About the Author: Cory Abbott is not a talented writer in any sense. Nonetheless, he has published over fifty papers in Game Theory, Natural Language Processing, Algorithms, Mathematical Psychology, and Machine Learning. He holds an A.B. from Harvard and an M.A. and Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in computer science.