The New York Times Spelling Bee is a daily online puzzle that presents a set of seven letters and challenges players to construct as many words as possible using them. There’s always at least one word — the “pangram” — that uses all seven letters. One letter is designated as the “center,” and that letter must appear in all the solutions.

《 纽约时报》拼字小蜜蜂是每天在线上的谜题，它显示一组七个字母，并挑战玩家使用它们来构造尽可能多的单词。 总是至少有一个单词-“ pangram”-使用所有七个字母。 一个字母被指定为“中心”，并且该字母必须出现在所有解决方案中。

I starting playing the Spelling Bee in the fall of 2018, and I quickly became fascinated with it. Before long I’d started building a little web tool to help me find solutions to the puzzle when I got stuck. All this was in service to my quest to achieve “Queen Bee” status — meaning that you have found every answer that the Times deems acceptable.

我从2018年秋天开始玩Spelling Bee，很快就迷上了它。 不久之后，我就开始构建一个网络工具来帮助我在遇到难题时找到解决方案。 所有这些都有助于我追求“蜂王”身份-这意味着您找到了《纽约时报》认为可以接受的所有答案。

Because that’s the other thing about the Bee — each day’s puzzle comes with a definitive list of acceptable answers. For some people, part of the fun and frustration of the Bee is arguing online about words that weren’t accepted in the puzzle but should have been, or that were accepted and shouldn’t have been. You’ll find endless examples of this exercise in the comments section of the Times Wordplay blog, or under the #spellingbee hashtag on Twitter.

因为那是蜜蜂的另一回事-每天的难题都带有可接受答案的明确列表。 对于某些人来说，“蜜蜂”的乐趣和沮丧之所以在网上引起争议，是因为难题中没有被接受但应该被接受或不应该被接受的单词。 在Times Wordplay博客的评论部分，或在Twitter上的#spellingbee标签下，您将找到无穷无尽的示例。

Sometimes a word that the editors once deemed unacceptable, such as “annal,” will suddenly end up whitelisted after much lobbying from the Bee community. Sometimes other words, which may have been deemed too obscure or unintentionally offensive, will make the reverse migration to the blacklist.

有时，曾经被编辑认为是不可接受的单词(例如“ annal ”)在经过Bee社区的大量游说后突然被列入白名单。 有时，可能被认为太晦涩或无意冒犯的其他词语会使反向迁移到黑名单。

Another thing the editors do with some frequency is to repeat a set of seven letters (or “hive”) after it has already appeared in the Bee. What keeps this from being too repetitive is that the designated center letter will be different. The pangram will be the same as before, but the differing center letter means there will still be some new words to find in the solution set.

编辑者经常要做的另一件事是，在蜜蜂中出现一组七个字母 (或“蜂巢”)后再重复一次 。 避免过于重复的原因是指定的中心字母会有所不同。 Pangram与以前相同，但是中心字母不同，这意味着在解决方案集中仍然可以找到一些新单词。

Over time I kept tinkering with my solver, adding new features, automating others, and generally sprucing up the layout. Gradually other players found it, and it now attracts more users to my site than even my manuscript formatting guide. Enough people use it that I’m fanatical about correcting any problems as soon as inhumanly possible.

随着时间的流逝，我不断修改自己的求解器，添加新功能，自动执行其他功能，并且通常会简化布局。 逐渐地，其他玩家发现了它，现在它比我的手稿格式指南吸引了更多的用户访问我的网站。 足够多的人使用它，我非常狂热地希望尽快以非人道的方式纠正任何问题。

There was one problem in particular that I knew might crop up one day but had not yet — what would happen if the editors ever decided to repeat one specific puzzle, hive, center letter and all. I wasn’t sure my solver would know the right way to handle this situation. In the back of my mind I knew I needed to shore things up against that eventuality. But I knew it would also take time and hard effort, so I kept putting it off.

特别是有一个问题，我知道可能有一天会出现，但还没有出现-如果编辑者决定重复一个特定的谜题，配置单元，中心字母等所有内容，将会发生什么。 我不确定我的求解器是否知道处理这种情况的正确方法。 在我的内心深处，我知道我需要为发生这种情况做好准备。 但是我知道这也需要时间和精力，所以我一直推迟。

I shouldn’t have. Because early this morning my nightmare scenario came true.

我不应该 因为今天早上我的噩梦成真了。

On this day of infamy, August 13, 2020, the Spelling Bee editors for the first time repeated a previous puzzle using the exact same center letter as before. Not only that, but they did it barely five weeks after the original version had appeared! The diabolical twist that really caused me such a headache was that the solution set for today included just ONE EXTRA WORD that had been disallowed in the previous incarnation of the puzzle, increasing the number of acceptable answers from 26 answers to 27.

在2020年8月13日这个臭名昭著的日子里，Spelling Bee编辑首次使用与以前完全相同的中心字母重复了上一个谜题。 不仅如此，而且在原始版本出现后仅五个星期就做到了！ 真正令我头疼的恶魔般的扭曲是，今天设置的解决方案仅包含一个在以前的谜题化身中不允许使用的多余单词 ，将可接受答案的数量从26个答案增加到27个。

I woke up early this morning, as usual, intending to get an hour or two of writing done before work. Unfortunately, I had several messages waiting from folks letting me know that my solver’s solution set for the day was not getting them all the way to Queen Bee status. With dawning horror, I realized that, while I did have all the day’s correct solutions in my database, my solver, confused by the identical letter set, was offering players the solution from July 8 instead.

我像往常一样今天早晨一大早醒来，打算在上班前花一两个小时完成写作。 不幸的是，我收到了来自乡亲的几条消息，让我知道，我今天求解器的解决方案并没有使它们始终达到Queen Bee状态。 惊恐万分的是，我意识到，尽管我的数据库中确实有整天正确的解决方案，但我的求解器却因相同的字母集感到困惑，而是从7月8日开始为玩家提供解决方案。

So, instead of working on my novel, I added a message of apology to the site and set to work. I got the problem fixed before I had to start work for the day, but it was a close thing. Hopefully now I’m prepared for when this happens again, as it surely will. I’m relieved that it’s taken care of, but I sure wish I’d gotten it done sooner. At least it happened today and not tomorrow on my day off, which is also my birthday and is reserved for socially distanced cocktails and other diversions. It would have been awful to have slept in only to awaken to a mess like this morning’s.

因此，我没有写小说，而是在网站上道歉并开始工作。 我不得不在一天开始工作之前就解决了问题，但这是一件很接近的事情。 希望现在我已经为再次发生这种情况做好了准备，肯定会的。 我已为它的处理感到欣慰，但我当然希望我能早日完成它。 至少在今天，而不是明天，这也是我的生日，它发生在今天，而不是明天，是为远离社交的鸡尾酒和其他改道而保留的。 睡到今天早上那样的烂摊子真是太可怕了。

The moral of the story is, when you see a problem coming, take care of it right away. Don’t wait for it to sting you between the eyes. The Boy Scouts were wrong about a lot of things, but they were right when they taught me, ahem, to “bee” prepared.

这个故事的寓意是，当您看到问题即将来临时，请立即进行处理。 不要等它刺伤你的双眼。 童子军在很多事情上都是错的，但是当他们教我“蜜蜂”准备时，它们是正确的。