Re^4: Challenge: Mystery Word Puzzle

Of course, that still leaves the final, hardest, step: generating actual real words from the letters. Again, this could be brute-forced, but where's the fun in that? ;-)

Actually, anagramming is extremely easy, to the point of being golf'ed on at least one occasion. I think the point of programmatically solving the puzzle is to get to the valid letter sets as elegantly as possible and leave the anagramming as "an exercise for the reader".

At least, if I was grading this, that's the solution that would get the A. :-)

Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing.
Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid.
Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence.
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Comment on Re^4: Challenge: Mystery Word Puzzle

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Re^5: Challenge: Mystery Word Puzzle by jdporter (Paladin) on Jan 17, 2005 at 18:54 UTC
Taking a set of letters and rearranging them is easy. Determining whether the resulting combination is valid word is not, except to look for it in a dictionary. Unless you know something I don't...	[reply]
Re^6: Challenge: Mystery Word Puzzle by dragonchild (Archbishop) on Jan 17, 2005 at 19:08 UTC
No, you're right. The point is that the number of dictionary lookups is orders of magnitude less than the other dictionary-based solutions that have been proposed. Instead of looking through all the N-letter words and seeing if they meet the rules, you generate the set of letters that meets the rules and figure out which orderings are valid words. So, you go from "All N-letter words" to "N! dictionary lookups". Being right, does not endow the right to be rude; politeness costs nothing. Being unknowing, is not the same as being stupid. Expressing a contrary opinion, whether to the individual or the group, is more often a sign of deeper thought than of cantankerous belligerence. Do not mistake your goals as the only goals; your opinion as the only opinion; your confidence as correctness. Saying you know better is not the same as explaining you know better.	[reply]


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