This is a follow on from my previous word puzzle:
Highest scoring words based on distance travelled along the alphabet
The twist in this puzzle which opens it up a lot more is that the alphabet can be traversed in a circle.
More formally: We define the circular alphabetic distance of a word to be the total amount of letters you need to traverse between each letter where you can loop from Z back to A and you must always count the shortest route.
Example: WORD had a score of 25 in the previous puzzle but now has a score of 23
- 8 character distance between W and O
- 3 character distance between O and R
- 12 character distance between R and D
Another example of a previous optimal solution for a 2 letter word ZA now only has a score of 1!
This puzzle is to find the highest scoring words for words of length N=6,7,8 (plus any higher if you're willing).
Optimal solutions can easily be found for N=2...5:
- N=2 AN Score 13
- N=3 NAN Score 26
- N=4 NANA Score 39
- N=5 RERER Score 52
My best attempts for you to beat for 6 and 7:
- N=6 COCOAS Score 56
- N=7 VIVIDLY Score 65
While I am not against writing a program to solve this I would appreciate letting some people have a go manually before adding your computed solutions.
