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Topic: CHORNICLE GAME ... (Read 12840 times) |
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coolnfundu
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CHORNICLE GAME ...
« on: Nov 10th, 2004, 9:42pm » |
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The SF Chronicle has a word game where all the letters are scrambled up and you have to figure out what the word is.
Imagine that a scrambled word is 5 characters long:
How many possible solutions are there?
What if we know which 5 letters are being used?
Develop an algorithm to solve the word.
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towr
wu::riddles Moderator
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Some people are average, some are just mean.
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Re: CHORNICLE GAME ...
« Reply #1 on: Nov 11th, 2004, 12:56am » |
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on Nov 10th, 2004, 9:42pm, coolnfundu wrote:| How many possible solutions are there? |
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::Much less than 265, because most letter combinations are disallowed, and even of those that could be words most won't be. At most a few thousand will be actual words.::
Quote:| What if we know which 5 letters are being used? |
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::less than 120, probably only a few dozen.::
Quote:| Develop an algorithm to solve the word. |
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::Preprocessing: Take a dictionary with all 5 letter words, for every word make a key existing of the sorted letters of the word. Sort (lexically) dictionary by key
Lookup: Sort the given letters, do binary search to find all anagrams::
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Wikipedia, Google, Mathworld, Integer sequence DB
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jgoemat
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Re: CHORNICLE GAME ...
« Reply #2 on: Apr 26th, 2005, 8:30pm » |
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Quote:| How many possible combinations? What if we know which 5 letters are being used? |
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If you are using all five letters, then there are 5 possible choices for the first letter, 4 for the second, 3 for the third, and 2 for the fourth, so that would be 120. It ends up being n!. If any letters are duplicates, then there are fewer. I think it would go down by d! for each duplicate. For instance, if you have AABCD, that would be 5!/2!. If you have AAAAD, that would be 5!/4! (or 5). If you have AABBB, that would be 5!/2!/3! (or 12).
I don't know of a formula to figure out all possible combinations of any letters, but for x letters, the possible combinations for words of length y is x!/(x-y+1)! I don't know how to account for duplicate letters in that...
Quote:| Develop an algorithm to solve the word. |
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I've written a web page to do word searches at http://www.jasongoemaat.com/WordSearch. If anyone is interested, I can send the code. It uses the enable word list from http://www.puzzlers.org/wordlists/.
What I did was sort the characters of each word by letter, then sort the results. Then when checking for a certain letter combination I sort those letters and do a binary search to find the letters and get the actual words from the list.
To find multiple words given multiple letters, I just try every possible combination. I sort the letters, then put them in arrays with letters and counts. Then I step through for each letter and add each possible count of that letter to a string (including 0) to a string and move to the next letter. For each combination after the last letter, I add it to a list. When done with that I to a search for each letter combination I created.
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madhuri
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Re: CHORNICLE GAME ...
« Reply #3 on: Mar 28th, 2012, 10:44am » |
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can u xplain me clearly abt d pgm
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Grimbal
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Re: CHORNICLE GAME ...
« Reply #4 on: Mar 29th, 2012, 9:14am » |
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Probably not. Jgoemat made 3 posts 7 years ago...
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keithgilabert
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Keith Gilabert, "Life is but a dream."
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Keith Gilabert, "CHORNICLE GAME ...&quo
« Reply #5 on: May 13th, 2012, 8:18pm » |
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Can you send me info on the word?
Keith Gilabert
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jordan6
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Re: CHORNICLE GAME ...
« Reply #6 on: May 29th, 2012, 5:02am » |
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Are you serious? developing an algorithm to guess a word from scramble letters sounds like an assignment for the military...
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Grimbal
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Re: CHORNICLE GAME ...
« Reply #7 on: Sep 12th, 2012, 12:48am » |
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There are plenty of anagram generators.
You enter a sentence or a set of letters and it returns sets of words that contain the same letters. If you set it to 1 word only, it should return the possible words for the letters.
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