Department Colloquium

Location: CW 113

Speaker: Edward Doolittle, First Nations Unviersity of Canada

Title:  Spot-It with Words

Abstract:

It is well-known how the design of the card game Spot-It can be accomplished with the use of finite projective planes.  In this work, joint with Zack Wolske of Ontario Tech University, we consider the question of designing a Spot-It game with cards containing actual English words instead of pictures.  Any set of pictures on a Spot-It card makes sense, but not every set of letters makes an English word, which provides an interesting constraint on the possible cards. It is possible to reason through the development of a projective plane of order 2 with three letter English words, and there are just a few answers.  There are somewhat more answers in French (why might that be?).  For designs of higher order, we must turn to a computer search, raising the question of how to conduct the search efficiently.  I will give the example of a complete projective plane of order 3 with five letter English words. I will conclude the talk with a discussion of possibilities in Indigenous languages.