Sarah,
On July 20, 2005 5:26:37 PM CDT you wrote:
A 10-letter word for a form of travel, that consists of five
consecutive symbols of chemical elements. What is it? If automobile
had been the answer, AU, would represent Gold, MO would represent
Molybdenum, and BI, would represent Bismuth. Unfortunately, the
remaining bigrams, TO and LE, are not chemical symbols.
I have put up a stack with two fields. The first contains all 10
letter words in my dictionary.
The second contains all two character elements from the periodic
table.
You task, should you choose to adopt it, is to write a Run Rev
handler to solve this weeks NPR puzzle defined above.
Before reading everyone else's solutions, I had a go and came up with
more or less the same script as anyone else. What intrigues me is that
there would appear to be 2 ways of tackling this problem and everyone
chose basically the same one.
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.
Thanks for the puzzle Jim, just what I needed to get the brain moving
first thing in the morning!
Sarah
My first try at a solution was to form random combinations of 5 symbols
and checking
to see if it was in the dictionary. But, alas, it took too long to
even find words,
so I went for the finding of words in the dictionary take matched the
any 5 symbols.
Fun problem,
Glenn
--
Glenn E. Fisher University of Houston - Retired
22402 Diane Dr. Spring, Tx 77373
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.uh.edu/~fisher
http://home.houston.rr.com/thegefishers/
http://homepage.mac.com/gefisher
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