programming puzzles?

[Michael Tobis]

Yeah, this was *much* easier than I expected.

My candidate was in second place according to /usr/share/dict/words
which has ixodid but not dioxid; I'm really not confident that dioxid
is a word.

I recall that I had also found the third place word now that I look at
it.

What I had to do was print out all combinations of letters that could
make between 999,000 and 1,001,000 and then eyeball them. The
factorization was a trick because I had only 16 bit ints if I recall
right; I think hacked it in floats.

I am amazed at how fast the Python ran and how easy it was to solve.

I found "ixodid" in two reasonable lines of Python or one over-long
ugly one, (in addition to what I already posted). It runs in about 15
seconds on a G4 powerbook. All in memory!

I once spent three whole days on this. Hundreds of lines of Fortran,
pages and pages of fanfold paper. Argh.

mt