Difficulty: ★ ★ ★ ★
Tetration is a mathematical process that generates obnoxiously huge numbers quickly. It’s exponentiation on overdrive. The concept is insane, but it’s also something you can code in C.
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Tetration
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Author Archives: dgookin
Finding All the Pangrams
I introduced the pangram concept in last week’s Lesson. The code demonstrated how to locate 7-letter words where no letter repeats, based on the online game Spelling Bee. But a pangram need not be limited to just seven letters.
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Hunting for 7-Character Pangrams
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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Finding Four-Letter Words
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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Numbers with Unique Digits – Solution
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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Checking Your Spelling
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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Numbers with Unique Digits
Difficulty: ★ ★ ★ ☆
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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Plucking Out a Random Word
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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Finding the Long Words
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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Reading the Dictionary
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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