Ep 401: Norm Do, Patrick Johns (March 12, 2012)

Rounds: Here.


We kick off series five with champion Norm carrying over 67 points from his first win, eight episodes ago.  Norm has two chihuahuas that like to watch the show; asked if they favour the letters or the numbers, Norm responds that he has not seen them get the numbers ever, but one of them may once have got WOOF in the letters.

A later chat reveals that they are named Choba and Taco, causing Lily great surprise -- she has a dog called Taco also.  Richard asks Lily whether her dog can play Letters and Numbers; Lily responds that he is a little bit "ruff" at it.

Tonight's challenger is Patrick Johns, a software engineer.  One of the software projects that he worked on a few years back was driverless trains -- it was for a mining company in Western Australia, and involved replacing the driver of iron ore trains with a computer that would drive the train instead.  This apparently has large benefits for both efficiency and safety.

I'll note that he did not give any identifying information beyond that, but my (possibly incorrect) belief is that the mining company in question was Rio Tinto and that Patrick undertook this work as part of Ansaldo STS.


Patrick consistently found five-letter words, which was good in a couple of places but mostly outdone by Norm's selections.  That would have put him well behind regardless, but Norm also managed to get closer on every numbers round.  Norm capped off this all-round performance by solving the conundrum at the halfway mark to finish with a comprehensive 62 to 10 victory.

I started off in good form, finding two longer words than David in the first round.  That's rare enough to be decidedly worth celebrating!  I continued in mostly good ways, but dropped three points in the first numbers round and missed a gettable and thematic eight in the last letters round.  But all in all it was a fairly decent game and a mid-sixties score to start with despite not scoring in one round.  An auspicious start to the series; I hope I can continue in this fashion.