Find a path from one word to another, changing one letter at a time. You may replace, add, or delete a single letter. Each move has a cost: for replacing a letter with another, this is the square of the cyclic distance in the roman alphabet between the two letters, and for adding or deleting a letter it is the square of the distance of the letter from the start/end of the alphabet.
You may also take an arbitrary anagram, but this costs 100.
All words must be in the wordlist and have length 3 to 7. The wordlist consists of those words in the SOWPODS Scrabble list of Scrabble-valid English words whose stem (according to hunspell) has an entry in the GCIDE or WordNet dictionaries.
Each problem stays up for a day. At the end, the current winner gets a point, and 5 mbmins. To become the current winner, find a path with lesser total cost than the best found so far.
mbmins, the prize for winning a day's wordtunneler game.
Please play without computer assistance! I'm not sure how easy it would be to bruteforce the search, since the distance formula is chosen to make A* not so effective... but I expect it would be easy to write an algorithm which outperforms a human. Please don't. If there's demand, we could have a separate competition for computer players / centaurs.