Editor’s note: This commences Anagram August with a superior type of progressive anagram. For an introduction and anagram trainer tool, see the previous post.

For some reason, at some point, someone looked at the idea of fishing for a mentally selected word by asking whether it contained certain letters and said, “that’s an anagram!” despite the fact that that’s not what anagram means! But despite the fact that the principle of branching anagrams has been around for 87 years, we still think there are some innovations to be had. Better living through new technology.

The original species of branching anagram we’re all most familiar with is the progressive anagram, in which the goal is to minimize the number of “no” answers you get, allowing you to pretend like you’re some kind of alphabet-obsessed mind-reader or something when you’re actually just fishing for information.

The downsides of progressive anagrams are well-known: they may require a lot of questions, and they really force you to have make your presentation about guessing letters. But, at least in the case of perfect progressive anagrams—in which the first time you get a “no” response, you already know the word—the upsides are clear as well: they are easy to memorize, and they let you potentially milk a lot of additional hits out of a simple word guess while only involving one miss which can be easily spun into a hit.

Let us suppose you want to do a presentation that’s definitely about guessing letters. For example, maybe you want to hold a participant’s hand and arm while they imagine writing each letter in the word over and over so that you can “channel the involuntary signals from their suppressed motor plans into your own pencil.” What properties would you want the anagram you use to have so you can seem to tap into your participant’s mind and correctly pull out letter after letter?

I want it to be a perfect progressive anagram!

Tough titties. Unless you carefully choose a set of words specifically for the purpose of having a perfect progressive anagram, that’s not an option. A natural category rarely has the right properties. You’re nearly always going to have some terms in your set that you can’t pin down without two or more “No” answers. But given that there are usually a multitude of different possible PA trees for any given set of terms, how should you go about constructing one to provide the optimal experience? Let’s compare two possible PAs for a star sign divination:

Which of these do you think would better suit the purpose as outlined above?

On the left, we have one that greedily tries to maximize the chance of a “Yes” answer. For the first letter, “I”, you have a 3/4 chance of “Yes”, and if that fails and you have to ask “A”, you still have a 2/3 chance of getting a “Yes.” And no matter what, you will never get more than 2 “No” answers before you have the word!

The one on the right can’t make these promises. When you ask about “S”, you have a whopping 50% chance of getting a “No” answer. And if you’re talking to a Leo, you’re going to elicit no less than three “No” responses before you know for sure.

But let’s look at the experience of, say, a Virgo or Capricorn. With the left PA, you’re coming hot right out of the gate with 3 or 4 right answers! You’re on fire! Clearly this whole letter thing is working! But then…Wham! Bam! Two misses right in a row. One miss you could easily excuse, but two in a row? Now you have to explain why the thing that was apparently working is no longer working and shift gears.¹

Meanwhile, on the right, no matter which outcome you land on, you always have at most one single miss once the streak of hits has started. A Virgo will see one miss while you’re “tuning up” your ability, then three consecutive hits, then just the one required miss to end, easy enough to excuse now that you know the actual answer. (“Oh, I had it upside-down! That’s a V, not an A!”)

But what about the Leos, you ask? Have I already forgotten I brought them up? Yes, we’re going to have three consecutive misses rather than the minimum possible number of two. But do you really think they’re counting? All they’re going to remember in either case is that at first you missed, and then you figured it out and stopped missing.

In short, if your presentation is about guessing letters, you really ought to be aiming for a tree like the one on the right. Rather than minimizing total misses, it should be aiming to frontload the excess misses. Misses at the beginning are easy to excuse and easy to forget. Excess misses that come after a streak of hits, however, necessarily look more like failure. Nonetheless, if you consult one of the freely available online tools for generating progressive anagrams, you’ll invariably get something that looks more like the one on the left. Accepting these as they are is taking the easy way out at the expense of a good presentation.

There’s one other advantage of a good frontloaded PA in my opinion: They’re easier to remember! Be honest, which of the following do you think you could commit to memory faster?

If you’re being honest, you’ve already memorized the letter order on the right: TUPER if yes on T, otherwise TURE². That’s it. Then it’s just memorizing the order of the planets, which you’d have to do for either of them. Meanwhile, on the left, you’re having to memorize multiple branches all the way down.

If it’s as obvious to you as it is to me why PAs with frontloaded misses are superior, by now you’re wondering why so many people have for so long found PAs like the ones on the left at all acceptable. Charitably, I’ll say: They just didn’t know what they were missing.

Now, I’ll freely admit that it’s not always possible to fully frontload all the misses for every set of terms you want a PA for. But now that you are aware that it’s worth trying to do, maybe you won’t be so quick to accept the first thing that comes out of your favorite generator.

1. Which means you probably should have been using a transgressive anagram all along… but more on those next week. ↩︎
2. If you noticed that, because this anagram starts with TU down both branches, it’s a perfect fit for a squared anagram, you’re our kind of people. As an exercise, scroll back up to the frontloaded star sign anagram and see if you can spot the single modification that gives it the same nice property! ↩︎