"Michael Tobis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > The first piece of code that I ever voluntarily wrote was intended to > solve this puzzle: > > Assign the number 2 to 'a', 3 to 'b' ... 27 to 'z'. To each word assign > the value of the product of its characters. Find the English (or > language of your choice) word whose product is closest to a million (or > number of your choice).
Hey, that was a contest in Games Magazine in the 1980's. A co-worker and I used a PDP-10 BASIC program to search for numbers near 1 million with no prime factors higher than 27. The factorizations of those numbers told us which letters to try to use, and after a while of fooling around rearranging letters on a whiteboard, we came up with "curvy", a very recognizable word that multiplies out to 999,856. That's the closest number to 1 million (other than 1 million itself) which doesn't have any prime factors that are too large. We convinced ourselves that there was no word that multiplied to exactly 1 million, so we felt we were likely to win the contest. However, somebody apparently with a computerized word list won with "ixodid". It was fun to remember this. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
