programming puzzles?

[mensanator at aol.com]

Paul Rubin wrote:
> "Michael Tobis" <mtobis at gmail.com> writes:
> > The first piece of code that I ever voluntarily wrote was intended to
> > solve this puzzle:
> >
> > Assign the number 2 to 'a', 3 to 'b' ... 27 to 'z'. To each word assign
> > the value of the product of its characters. Find the English (or
> > language of your choice) word whose product is closest to a million (or
> > number of your choice).
>
> Hey, that was a contest in Games Magazine in the 1980's.  A co-worker
> and I used a PDP-10 BASIC program to search for numbers near 1 million
> with no prime factors higher than 27.  The factorizations of those
> numbers told us which letters to try to use, and after a while of
> fooling around rearranging letters on a whiteboard, we came up with
> "curvy", a very recognizable word that multiplies out to 999,856.
>
> That's the closest number to 1 million (other than 1 million itself)
> which doesn't have any prime factors that are too large.  We convinced
> ourselves that there was no word that multiplied to exactly 1 million,
> so we felt we were likely to win the contest.  However, somebody
> apparently with a computerized word list won with "ixodid".  It was
> fun to remember this.

The trouble with word lists is when you run across something
you don't recognize, like "ixodid", you can't tell if it's a word or
an acronym or an abbreviation. Being in the environmental
remediation business, I thought "dioxid" (which I assume is
related to "dioxin") to be more plausible as a word.

And it would seem that Games no longer has contests that
simply find words, they add a twist to prevent those like me
from having an advantage. See

<http://members.aol.com/mensanator/pig_ignorance.htm>

I still used my word list database to find valid words to use
in my contest entries, but entries are judged, not simply scored.