Out of the 26 letters of the English alphabet we generate words containing 6 unique letters.
So there are c(26,6)=230,230 such words. I asked to be provided with a list of 25, 6 letter words, in such a way that these words to intersect as many as possible of the 230,230 words, in at least 3 letter. I wish to rank the answers I received according with the total number of words they intersect. Is there any way, other than brute force, to calculate: 1) How many words are intersected by the list only once, 2) How many twice, 3) How many three times...... An examples of such a list is below: A B F K P X A B M S V Y A C G I N W A C J L R X A D K L O U A E H Q T Z B C D K S Z B E G L N W B H I J K V B I Q R T U C E O P U V C F H L M Q C H N P T Y D E I M N X D F G H R V D J P Q W Y E F I O Y Z E K R S W Y F J N Q S U G I L P S T G J K M O T G Q U X Y Z H O S U W X L T V W X Z M N O P R Z By a "brute force" algorithm I come up with the following for the above list. 229,942 words out of the 230,230 are intersected in at least 3 letters. 288 words are not intersected. This answers the ranking of the lists. I could revise my algorithm to calculate the questions 1,2 & 3 but does exist some other faster way to calculate the nunber of intersections? . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
