I’m a fan of the online game Spelling Bee. In this game, you use a combination of seven letters to spell various words. Each word is at least four-letters long and must contain a special letter, shown in the center of Figure 1. When you create a word that contains all seven letters, you’ve discovered a pangram.
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Not all the nasty words are four letters long, but a good chunk of them are. If you ran the program from last week’s Lesson, you can quickly check the computer’s dictionary for the words you once couldn’t say on TV, gleefully typing them in and confirming that they exist in the dictionary. But how many four letter words are there?
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I hope you came up with an interesting solution for this month’s Exercise, one different from my own. The goal is to output unique values from zero through ten billion, values where no two digits repeat.
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At the basic level, a spell-checker works as a simple comparison program: The word in question is compared with each word in the dictionary. When the source word isn’t found, it’s assumed to be misspelled. With a dictionary file on your computer, it’s easy for a C programmer to code this type of program.
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I’m sure some eccentric term exists to describe a number where no digits repeat. Whether this concept has any mathematical relevance remains uncertain. But it’s the type of problem you can easily solve by writing a computer program.
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It’s time for your computer to babble nonsensically. No alcohol is necessary. All you must do is pluck out a random word from the dictionary. Run the program several times and you have babbly nonsense: subtotal spectacles lute's sushi's. Brilliant! *HIC*
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Beyond knowing how many words are in the computer’s dictionary, another good measure to know is how many characters are in the longest word. Together, these two values give you a profile for the complete word matrix.
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I admit it: I’m a nerd and I read the dictionary. I know it’s a reference, not a work of fiction. The plot is weak. But I found it enjoyable as a kid to discover new words and their meanings. Alas, the Unix dictionary file lists only words and not definitions. But how many words are in there?
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I hope you didn’t “flip out” over this month’s Exercise. Flipping a coin can be done by hand or by using a computer. Using a computer is easier because it can be programmed to record each flip and it saves you hand muscle molecules for flipping and the chore of writing down the results.
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My first Unix System Administrator job was pretty routine: I did backups. It was only later that I discovered some of the many nerdy treasures available in that operating system.
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