Charles Hartman wrote:
On Jul 20, 2005, at 6:26 PM, Sarah Reichelt wrote:
You can either go through the word list and see if any match the
elements, or you could go through the element list, making
combinations and matching them to the words. I discarded this idea
because the maths involved in working out all the permutations &
combinations has long since flowed out of my brain, but I wonder if
anyone else thought of using this method? Instinctively I feel it
would take longer, but there are 3620 words and only 97 elements.
If I remember right, that would be 97! / 5! x (97-5)!. And that -- if
I'm *also* getting the arithmetic right -- would mean 64,446,024 ten-
letter words to check. Looks like everyone's instinct to go the other
way was sound.
No, they're not "combinations" - there's nothing to say you can't use
the same symbol more than once in a word (in fact, some of the words
do), so the number of words to check is simply 97 ^ 5 = 8,587,340,257
Yes, I did think of doing it that way. I also, just for the heck of it
thought of forming a monster regex
"[Al|Ar|.....|Zr][Al| ...Zr]..."
and seeing what that did - but neither of them seemed very likely, so I
didn't try them.
--
Alex Tweedly http://www.tweedly.net
--
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Anti-Virus.
Version: 7.0.323 / Virus Database: 267.9.0/50 - Release Date: 16/07/2005
_______________________________________________
use-revolution mailing list
[email protected]
Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription
preferences:
http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-revolution
