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The Doublet Puzzle: A Masterpiece from the Pen of Lewis Carroll
Most people probably know Lewis Carroll as the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There. He was also a mathematician, who wrote important works in the field, such as A Syllabus of Plane Algebraical Geometry and Euclid and His Modern Rivals. But to a puzzle fanatic Carroll is regarded as one of the greatest puzzle-makers of all time, if not the greatest. His Pillow Problems and A Tangled Tale, for example, contain puzzles that have become classics, being used in various disguises, variations, and elaborations in puzzle anthologies ever since. One of Carroll's puzzle unquestioned masterpieces is the doublet, which he introduced through the pages of Vanity Fair in March of 1879. He likely took the name for his puzzle from the witches' incantation in Macbeth: "Double, double, toil and trouble." The doublet asks us to transform a given word into another by changing only one letter at a time, forming a genuine new word (not a proper name) with each letter change. The puzzle seems simple enough, but it really isn't, as new solvers soon discover. For example, can you turn HEAD into TAIL? The solution involves five letter changes, producing four "links" between HEAD and TAIL. HEAD heal (Results from changing the "d" of "head" to "l") teal (Results from changing the "h" of "heal" to "t") tell (Results from changing the "a" of "teal" to "l") tall (Results from changing the "e" of "tell" to "l") TAIL (Results from changing the first "l" of "tall" to "i") By the way, this is the original doublet puzzle devised by Carroll for Vanity Fair. The doublet became an instant craze in London. In 1879, the publisher Macmillan assembled the puzzles in Vanity Fair into a booklet titled Doublets: A Word Puzzle, which sold out quickly, being followed by two other editions containing more puzzles each time. Try your hand at the following doublets, taken mainly from this collection. 1. Can you evolve APE into MAN with just four links? 2. Make FLOUR into BREAD with five links. 3. Go from SLEEP to DREAM with five links. 4. Increase ONE to TWO with six links. 5. Turn BLACK into WHITE with six links. 6. Make GRASS GREEN with six links. 7. Turn BLUE into PINK with eight links. 8. Can you get from RIVER to SHORE with 10 links? 9. Can you transform a WITCH into a FAIRY with 12 links? Carroll later modified the rules to make the puzzles more difficult. Here is the example he used to introduce a new version of the doublet: Change IRON into LEAD by introducing a new letter or by rearranging the letters of the word at any step. You may not do both in the same step. IRON icon (Results from changing the "r" in "iron" to "c") coin (Results from rearranging the letters in "icon") corn (Results from changing the "i" in "coin" to "r") cord (Results from changing the "n" in "corn" to "d") lord (Results from changing the "c" in "cord" to "l") load (Results from changing the "r" in "lord" to "a") LEAD (Results from changing the "o" in "load" to "e") Now, try your hand at this kind of doublet.
10. Change HATE into VEIL with three links.
The doublet has cropped up in a number of unexpected settings. For example, the mad narrator in Vladimir Nabokov's novel Pale Fire recalls playing the doublet game, which he calls "word golf." Here is Nabokov's puzzle. Can you solve it?
11. Change LASS to MALE with three links.
Biologist John Maynard Smith constructed the following doublet in his essay titled "The Limitations of Molecular Evolution." Can you come up with the solution?
