Big Brain’s puzzle for the weekend of March 11-12 was essentially an anagram puzzle. Using the following 12 letters:
e c m a o n s a d e l k
form an 8-letter (English) word and a 4-letter (English) word. One word tastes good and the other carries stuff. Usually, I am at a loss to write a program that can re-sort letters and find what look to be valid words. However, I recently found an anagram generator. Go to the homepage of the GNU MP Bignum library, scroll way to the bottom and find “Demo 2 — Find Anagrams”. One day, I hope to understand how big numbers pertain to computing anagrams. Anyway, insert those 12 letters and you will find an impressive list of anagrams, including the correct answer for the puzzle! For added enjoyment, insert your name or those of your friends (the Guru’s name anagrams to “Hemimeridae larceny”).
Your reign of terror-logic will not last long, Pickover. We have technology on our side.
What about matching over ‘words’ file found in many Unix distribtutions?
scrabble has paid off, the words jumped out at me.
lemonade
sack
Kostya: I thought about generating letter permutations and checking them against a dictionary. In fact, I did just that for another puzzle that I will post soon since it was not a straightforward anagram puzzle
Ron: Good work. The problem I am having is that, like the general spell checker/calculator phenomenon, computers are making me lazy. If I see one of these puzzles that I think might be solvable by a computer program, I set out to write that program if I can’t solve it after looking at it for 10 seconds.