NPR puzzle

[Glenn E. Fisher]

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
gfisher4 at houston.rr.com 	http://www.uh.edu/~fisher
http://home.houston.rr.com/thegefishers/
http://homepage.mac.com/gefisher