Scotland on Sunday readers' letters: I missed out on millions with the Arbroath ‘wordle’ game

In the early 1960s I and two schoolfriends spent our summer holidays working at the Arbroath Herald. Our job was to collate the pages for the Braemar Gathering Annual which would then go on to be sold at the Braemar Highland Games.

The New York Times bought Wordle, a phenomenon played by millions just four months after the game burst onto the Internet, for an "undisclosed price in the low seven figures". (Photo by Stefani Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

This was an exceedingly boring job and in order to relieve the boredom I invented a game whereby I would think of a five letter word and my friends had to guess what it was.

They would give me a word and I would tell them how many letters of their word were in my word. I even sent my game to the BBC, as I thought it could make an entertaining game show. However they rejected it.

As my children were growing up we played it during long car journeys to pass the time. I also played it with primary school classes that I used to teach. I was extremely annoyed when the Master Mind game came out.

Five different coloured pegs were placed in slots and players had to guess which pegs were where. For each guess they were told how many colours were correct and how many were in the correct place. I felt that this was a clear copy of my game.

The only differences between ‘wordle’ and my game are that I didn't tell players which letters were correct nor which were in the correct position, and players were allowed more than six guesses.

I only wish now I'd taken out a patent on my game. I could maybe have been a millionaire by now.

W. A. Ross, Aberdeen

Nuclear option

Rolls-Royce have been making safe nuclear reactors for our submarines for over 50 years. Now they are upscaling that technology to produce factory-built small modular reactors each of which will generate 470MW of zero carbon electricity for at least 60 years.

Already the Roll-Royce SMR consortium have signed a £3.7m contract with Sheffield Forgemaster, the world leaders in forgings and castings to design the forgings required.

Each of these reactors will produce enough electricity to power one million homes 365 days a year regardless of weather conditions. Each will require only a small site and the reactor is small enough to be transported by lorry.

Their supply chain is British although they have attracted investment from overseas. Their export potential is huge. And their production will stimulate a renaissance in UK research and high-end technology; already Rolls-Royce have established 25 University Technology Centres throughout the country.

If we compare SMRs with wind farms the benefits are obvious. Wind energy is intermittent. Last year there were many periods of calm conditions including one lengthy spell which recorded the calmest conditions for ten years. The more wind farms there are the harder it becomes for National Grid's control room at Warwick to balance the Grid as it must do at 50Hz.

While windfarms need millions of tons of concrete poured onto the countryside and hundreds of miles of access roads, SMRs do not scar the countryside; they have a footprint smaller than a large Tesco. Unlike wind companies which are mostly foreign-owned, like Spanish-owned Scottish Power, they will be produced by a British company here in Britain and and exported, not imported.

However, thanks to the SNP, Scotland will not benefit from this modern technology as it turns its back on sinews of industry in its new Green guise.

William Loneskie, Lauder, Berwickshire

Power play

This week we saw the Westminster bear garden (conventionally known as “Parliament”) debating, if you can call it that, the heavily redacted Sue Gray report into the recent Downing Street shenanigans.

During the “debate” Ian Blackford MP asserted that Boris Johnson had “misled Parliament”. This phrase, in Westminster terms, is the equivalent of calling Boris Johnson a liar. As a consequence Blackford left the chamber before he was suspended and forcibly removed from it.

So we have the farcical situation, not for the first time, that an MP who calls another MP a liar is suspended from the Westminster parliament while the MP who has allegedly lied is permitted to remain because whatever the truth of the matter (and I think we all have a shrewd idea about that) one MP simply cannot impugn the integrity of another under any circumstances whatsoever.

We then had the ridiculous, unedifying, spectacle of various Westminster government ministers being trotted out to do the rounds of radio and TV studios to defend the indefensible.

And our very own Boris Johnson acolyte, Alister Jack MP, standing up in parliament in order to assert what we all know to be complete rubbish, namely that “the Prime Minister is doing a fantastic job” and other such sycophantic nonsense.

When will people in the south of Scotland realise that people like Alister Jack and Boris Johnson do not care a whit about them. All they care about is hanging onto power by whatever means they consider necessary. I despair!

David Howdle, Dumfries

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