NPR puzzle

Sarah Reichelt sarahr at genesearch.com.au
Wed Jul 20 18:26:37 EDT 2005


> 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




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