Comment by woolion

It seems to me that it's exactly why I don't like word games. They use words like "combine", but it's generally mixing abstractions or taxonomies.

To guess it, I looked at 'crab' because it's a quite uncommon that has some deep relationship with a few words only. Then checked the most obvious one (which was the solution) against the other words, and determined that it didn't bear any significant relationship to the third word. So I checked the other (less obvious) potential solutions, and after a frustrating lack of match, I gave up. And then got annoyed that the first candidate was the right one. To be fair, I guess it's partly because I'm an ESL, as I think that solution/sauce can be used as a nominative locution enough to form a "special relationship".

To be a designer, you have to play with people's (as in general crowd, not individuals) general understanding of the subject. In particular, that means avoiding the curse of knowledge, and yes for normal people PC meant "not Apple consumer product". So ultimately, the search algorithm includes:

- categorize all relationships between words, ranked by strength

- compare with what is expected to be known in popular culture (adjust ranks)

- match against the designer's expectations of similar problems (look for clues to pick a best match)

It's a lot of words to say it's the opposite of a aha moment, the result of a pure computational problem, that is often quite frustrating. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.