Puzzle Challenge
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg63339] Puzzle Challenge
- From: gleam at flashmail.com
- Date: Sat, 24 Dec 2005 07:19:04 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
A Merry Christmas to all! I offer the following word puzzle as a friendly challenge to list participants. Please consider the game board: http://www.mathematica-users.org/mediawiki/images/0/03/hexagonpuzzle.gif __ __/C \__ __/O \__/E \__ __/L \__/I \__/R \__ /D \__/P \__/N \__/U \ \__/E \__/R \__/A \__/ \__/A \__/T \__/ \__/S \__/ \__/ The goal is to find as many words as possible of length five or greater that each can be spelled by starting on a hexagonal token and hopping from one token to the next. You may use a token multiple times while spelling a word, but not twice in a row. For example, you may spell APART but not COOLED. Your program should work on a puzzle with arbitrarily chosen letters. Your solution will not be judged, but please put effort into your algorithm, and tell us what makes it excel. For example, was your goal to write the most concise function? The most elegant? Fastest? Unusual? A a robust function that will solve a larger set of puzzles? You will need word lists (dictionary files) and I recommend ENABLE2k or the even larger YAWL, both available from: http://personal.riverusers.com/~thegrendel/software.html I hope you will really enjoy working this puzzle, as well as seeing each other's results! Paul
