jaw@ames-lm.UUCP (James A. Woods) (05/30/84)
# Cleverly he dialed from within.
-- Don van Vliet, from "Trout Mask Replica"
It has come to my attention, via Martin Gardner, that Lee Sallows
of the Netherlands has constructed a combinatorial machine to search
for self-referential pangrams of the form:
This pangram lists four a's, one b, one c, two d's,
twenty-nine e's, eight f's, three g's, five h's, eleven i's,
one j, one k, three l's, two m's, twenty-two n's,
fifteen o's, two p's, one q, seven r's, twenty-six s's,
nineteen t's, four u's, five v's, nine w's, two x's, and one z.
Whew! The initial device methodically tested 2.71 x 10**12 combinations
at the rate of one million a second for 31.4 days. He varied the word
choice (instead of "lists", he tried "contains", "consists of", "uses",
"employs", "tallies", "is composed of", etc.) after building a "Mark II"
engine which reduced search time to 105 minutes.
This amazing information (coveyed quite suspensefully) was uncovered
during the course of my own research with anagram and pangram generation.
(If you missed my earlier notes and paper, regular pangram search is an
NP-complete knapsack problem, but amenable to fast computer implementation.)
Sallows problem seems to be a Latin-square (or N-queens) type puzzle,
and I suspect the search for certain algebraic codes is carried out
similarly. I'd like to see if a Cray can match his speed.
I must correspond with the man, and will report more later.
-- James A. Woods {research,hplabs,hao,dual}!ames-lm!jawjaw@ames-lm.UUCP (James A. Woods) (05/30/84)
# Cleverly he dialed from within.
-- Don van Vliet, from "Trout Mask Replica"
It has come to my attention, via Martin Gardner, that Lee Sallows
of the Netherlands has constructed a combinatorial machine to search
for self-referential pangrams of the form:
This pangram lists four a's, one b, one c, two d's,
twenty-nine e's, eight f's, three g's, five h's, eleven i's,
one j, one k, three l's, two m's, twenty-two n's,
fifteen o's, two p's, one q, seven r's, twenty-six s's,
nineteen t's, four u's, five v's, nine w's, two x's, and one z.
Whew! The initial device methodically tested 2.71 x 10**12 combinations
at the rate of one million a second for 31.4 days. He varied the word
choice (instead of "lists", he tried "contains", "consists of", "uses",
"employs", "tallies", "is composed of", etc.) after building a "Mark II"
engine which reduced search time to 105 minutes.
This amazing information (coveyed quite suspensefully) was uncovered
during the course of my own research with anagram and pangram generation.
(If you missed my earlier notes and paper, regular pangram search is an
NP-complete knapsack problem, though amenable to fast computer implementation.)
Sallows' problem seems to be a Latin-square (or N-queens) type puzzle,
and I suspect the search for certain algebraic codes is carried out
similarly. I'd like to see if a Cray can match his speed.
I must correspond with the man, and will report more later.
-- James A. Woods {research,hplabs,hao,dual}!ames-lm!jaw