{"id":301,"date":"2013-09-05T14:00:45","date_gmt":"2013-09-05T21:00:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/?p=301"},"modified":"2013-09-01T16:03:08","modified_gmt":"2013-09-01T23:03:08","slug":"npr-puzzle-for-2013-09-01-a-perl-solution","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/2013\/09\/05\/npr-puzzle-for-2013-09-01-a-perl-solution\/","title":{"rendered":"NPR Puzzle for 2013-09-01: a perl solution"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s this past week’s NPR puzzle<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Think of a well-known celebrity who goes by a single name \u2014 the last two letters of which are alphabetically separated by only one letter (like A and C, or B and D). Replace this pair of letters with the one that separates them, and you’ll have a common, everyday word. What is it?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It used to be that a puzzle like this was tough to solve with a computer program, because there wasn’t a list of famous names available anywhere. Well, now there is such a list<\/a>, and it makes solving things like this a snap. You will still need a list of common words to solve this puzzle, but those are available all over. I used the Enable dictionary from the NPL<\/a>.<\/p>\n

A few interesting quirks happened along the way to solving this puzzle. First, it turns out that this particular person isn’t listed in Wikipedia by only his\/her first name. So I had to tweak the code a bit to look at all possible first names in my list. This created a bit of a logjam because ROBERT -> ROBES comes up a ton. So the final hacked code to give the answer is below. Not my best work, but not bad for ten minutes.<\/p>\n

It’s also a relief to see that the intended answer had a score of 100. YAY FAMOUS PEOPLE LIST
\n
\n[perl]#!\/usr\/bin\/perl -w<\/p>\n

use strict;<\/p>\n

my $USAGE = “Usage: $0 NAME_FILE WORDLIST_FILE”;<\/p>\n

my $name_file = $ARGV[0] or die $USAGE;
\nmy $word_list_file = $ARGV[1] or die $USAGE;<\/p>\n

my %names;
\nopen FILE1, $name_file or die $!;
\nwhile ()
\n{
\n\tchomp;
\n\t# Everything uppercase for consistency
\n\tmy $name = uc $_;
\n\tmy $score = 100;
\n\t# Take out names with spaces
\n\t#next if $name =~ \/ \/;
\n\tif ($name =~ \/^(.*)\\t(\\d+)$\/) {$name = $1;$score = $2;}
\n\t$names{$name} = $score;
\n}
\nclose FILE1;<\/p>\n

my %words;
\nopen FILE2, $word_list_file or die $!;
\nwhile ()
\n{
\n\tchomp;
\n\t$words{uc $_} = 1;
\n}
\nclose FILE2;<\/p>\n

# Go through names to find a match
\nmy %used;
\nwhile (my ($name, $score) = each(%names))
\n{
\n\tmy $first; my $second;
\n\tif ($name =~ \/^(.*?) \/) {$name = $1;}
\n\tif ($name =~ \/^(.*)(..)$\/)
\n\t{
\n\t\t$first = $1;
\n\t\t$second = $2;
\n\t}
\n\tnext unless $second;
\n\t#print “$name $first $second\\n”;
\n\tmy $num = ord(substr($second,0,1));
\n\tif (ord(substr($second,1,1)) == $num + 2)
\n\t{
\n\t\tmy $let = chr($num + 1);
\n\t\tmy $word = $first . $let;
\n\t\tif ($words{$word} && !$used{$name})
\n\t\t{
\n\t\t\tprint “$score\\t$name\\t$word\\n”;
\n\t\t\t$used{$name} = 1;
\n\t\t}
\n\t}
\n}[\/perl]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s this past week’s NPR puzzle: Think of a well-known celebrity who goes by a single name \u2014 the last two letters of which are alphabetically separated by only one letter (like A and C, or B and D). Replace … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-301","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-coding","category-puzzles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":307,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions\/307"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alexboisvert.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}