Woo! Go Clam!
'scuse me I mean "thou hast enlightened".
Curious that MS Excel helped out, were you doing some sort of statistical analysis with the frequency of letters or something?
[In case people are still unclear on the ordering condition: for example BLACK disobeys the ordering because the B appears before the A (and also before the K) in the word. LAB is okay since A is before B just like in "AKHTBN"--not having K, H or T in "LAB" is fine, the ordering condition is only on the "blessed" letters that are present in the koan. AAKK would be okay while AKAK would not. AABB good, ABAB bad. And yes, BUDDHA is ironically not okay.
]
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In hindsight perhaps I should've forgo the ordering condition, but then again, we previously did a round already (geoo mastered) where Buddha nature is conferred simply by inclusion of a set of blessed letters, so I guess I thought it would be too much of the same, and thought the little twist would be a good idea. Or maybe I should've kept the twist but use a smaller set of blessed letters instead (people were at least eventually picking up on A, B and K, even though everyone also seemed to have forgotten by then that the initial white koan of WHITE has none of those three letters).
And in my defense, generally speaking the way people were going about this often didn't help, with so many long-length koans which are bound to disobey the required ordering. If people did like I did with geoo's round and say, do the 26 single-letter koans, I imagine things would've been much clearer. People were drawing some good theories, but often got hung up by examples where the koans have more special letters than the ones they were suspecting, which ends up confusing people as to why those koans don't seem to fit. Testing out smaller koans might've helped in those cases.
Had someone went the "hint" route and post an obviously incorrect rule guess, I have planned out these fun koans to reveal (amongst other possibilities like literally AKHTBN):
AKIDHELPSTIMBUYNOODLES (white)
TIMHELPSAKIDBUYNOODLES (black)
I also early on wrote a computer program to check people's koans, so if at any point someone bring up whether I could've made a mistake somewhere along the way with so many koans at play, the answer would be a firm "no" (other than copy-paste errors when inputting into computer program, but I had been very careful with that).
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Anyway, Clam can do the next round, or call open floor and have someone else do it. Or maybe we can all use a break and play some other forum game instead?
