jaw@ames-lm.UUCP (James A. Woods) (04/24/84)
# Legen Sie Ihr Geld in Dada an! (Invest in dada)
--anon., from "Dada in Art"
ANNOUNCEMENT: at approximately 22:00 on April 3, 1984, after six
hours of VAX 11/750 CPU time, my notorious anagram program generated (amongst
other drivel), the following minimal 26-letter English pangram, or
"holoalphabetic sentence":
Jocks vend, fix, quartz BMW glyph.
This can loosely be interpreted as the destiny of a certain hood ornament
curio sold at a fraternity garage sale.
The algorithm used was one vastly improved from work reported earlier
in this newsgroup. Without a recently conceived "rarest first" heuristic,
the addition of a chess-endgame-like "hashed recursion eliminator," the
use of a precomputed bit map data structure to speed string clash detection,
and prudent C optimization, the computation would have taken WEEKS instead
of minutes. If you've written for my paper of two months ago detailing
the approach (complete with allusions to "NP-hardness"), it is hopelessly
out-of-date. Write me for a new copy.
CHALLENGE: find a minimal English pangram which does not use proper
names, initials, obscure, or foreign words, yet does not require a convoluted
explanation. Most (necessarily labor-intensive) human attempts involve
words such as the Welsh "cwm" (for steep hollow), the Hebrew "qoph"
(meaning "eye of the needle"), or perhaps a reference to the Albanian
language "Shqip" (sounds like a UNIX command).
I would like to thank the net for responding well to my early efforts
at this high art, and for connecting me to Mike Morton of Dartmouth, who
also has a rather swift anagram generator. Mike happens to have a collection of
the best "Reaganagrams" around! Inquire within.
-- James A. Woods {research,dual,hplabs,hao}!ames-lm!jawntt@dciem.UUCP (Mark Brader) (04/26/84)
Perhaps* it's worth posting my favorite holoalphabetic sentence, or pangram,
which appeared in Martin Gardner's column years ago:
"XV quick nymphs beg fjord waltz."
The same article gave several others, but all the ones that did not cheat
("XV", "BMW") had extra letters or needed considerable explanation.
*Well, I'm doing it anyway.
Mark Brader
"There are other ways of persuading besides killing and threatening to kill."