NPR puzzle

[Alex Tweedly]

Jim Hurley wrote:

> For my fellow puzzle addicts:
>
> Here is this weeks NPR puzzle (Sunday Weekend edition)
>
> Sunday Puzzle
>
> By Will Shortz
>
>
> Challenge for July 24:
>
> 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.
>
> In the message box:
>
> go stack url  "http://home.infostations.net/jhurley/NPRpuzzle.rev"
>
Jim - do you think we have nothing better to do ??
I'm now an extra 15 minutes late on my deadline :-) :-)

I found 23 answers in your dictionary - just using a simple brute force 
search.
Interesting though sifting each position in turn, the number of 
possibles reduces :
3620
1626
509
216
101
23

Warning : code below - don't read any further unless you want to see it 
.....







I renamed your fields to "Words" and "Symbols", and added a couple of 
others named "status" and "Possible"

on mouseUp
  local w, s, i, theWords, wcount, theBit, nextWords, thisBitMatches
  put field "Words" into theWords
  repeat with i = 1 to 9 step 2
    put 0 into wcount
    put empty into nextWords
    repeat for each line w in theWords
      put char i to i+1 of w into theBit
      add 1 to wcount
      put "Working on position " && i && "Possible: " && the number of 
lines in theWords && wcount into line 1 of field "status"
      put false into thisBitMatches
      repeat for each line s in field "Symbols"
        if s = theBit then
          put true into thisBitMatches
          exit repeat
        end if
      end repeat
      if thisBitMatches then put w & cr after nextWords
    end repeat
    put nextWords into theWords
    put the number of lines in theWords into line (i+1)/2 of field 
"Possible"
  end repeat
  put cr & theWords after field "status"
end mouseUp


-- 
Alex Tweedly       http://www.tweedly.net



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