S.O.S. Mathematics CyberBoard

The Amazing Restin is a psychic. She can figure out anything anybody is thinking, as long as she is lying down. She gives performances all over the country. One of her favorite gimmicks features words: Her assistant thinks of a five-letter word. Then the Amazing Restin proceeds to guess five-letter words, and her assistant tells her how many letters the word he thought of shares with the word she guessed. One day, she guessed five words and he told her that each of her words shared exactly two letters with the word he had in mind. Here are the five words she guessed:
BLUNT
VOTER
SPICE
BUOYS
MADLY

What word did the assistant have in mind?

I know that this was already solved on yahoo answers but how did they exclude b, o , and u when trying to find the answer because these letters were common between two words?

Please explain how to solve this problem.

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This belongs in miscellaneous. Topic moved.

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Please provide a link to the solution you have already viewed so we can see which step you're talking about.

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Here is the link:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20070511183717AAyWsxt

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If I understand the answer's methodology, then you're right the other letters ought to have been included, but in the end one would look within that mess of letters and find that style is the word they were seeking, because the other options wouldn't have satisfied the conclusion. I think the solution in the link is flawed in that way, but it's a good heuristic.

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Do you know if there is another way to solve this problem better than what was done?

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Not really, looking for common letters is the right idea, and narrowing it down by only choosing ones that appear in two or more words is a pretty safe heuristic.

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