Shark's Dinner
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The objective is to work out what mathematical word or phrase has been replaced by dashes by suggesting letters that might be in that word or phrase. Each time you choose a letter that is not in the word or phrase the shark will get a little closer to eating its dinner. Click a letter button above to begin.
Statistically speaking, which letters are the most likely to be in the word or phrase? See the Transum Code Cracking presentation for more information.
The solutions to this and other Transum puzzles, exercises and activities are available here when you are signed in to your Transum subscription account. If you do not yet have an account and you are a teacher, tutor or parent you can apply for one by completing the form on the Sign Up page.
A Transum subscription also gives you access to the 'Class Admin' student management system, downloadable worksheets, many more teaching resources and opens up ad-free access to the Transum website for you and your pupils.
For this particular activity a subscriber also has the facility to enter their own words for use in the game. This allows the content to be customised for the learner's particular needs.
Shark's Dinner can also be played as a two player game. A player continues selecting letters until they select one that isn't in the word. Then the other player starts their turn. The winner is the player who completes the word.
Do you have any comments? It is always useful to receive feedback and helps make this free resource even more useful for those learning Mathematics anywhere in the world. Click here to enter your comments.
What is the best strategy for this game? In what order should you choose letters? The obvious answer would be to find a list of the most common letters used in the English language and use this as your letter selection order.
You may be surprised to hear that this is not necessarily the best strategy. Words of different lengths will have different letter frequencies. Also when you have established whether are particular letter is or isn't in a word your next choice should be affected by that knowledge.
Tom Whipple is the science editor for The Times in London and in an eposode of the Freakonomics podcast he talked about his book How to Win Games and Beat People in which he discusses strategies that might be used when playing games similar to Shark's Dinner. Here is an extract from the podcast:
The fish tank has been adapted from code kindly provided by Dhiraj kumar.
Sara, 8S
Monday, March 6, 2017
"If you get the answer correct the some think funny should happen like instead of the shark chasing the goldfish, the gold fish could chase the shark.
[Transum: That's a great idea Sara. It will go into the update plans. Thanks]"
Alderman Bolton CP, Twitter
Sunday, February 4, 2018
Miss O'Donoghue, The London Oratory School.
Friday, February 4, 2022
"I agree with Sara's suggestion. The result of a correct answer should be more entertaining than getting it wrong. Otherwise someone will always want to call out "x" and "z" and other unlikely letters."