T
Terry Pinnell
While on holiday recently I was given a sheet of about 50 anagrams to
work out. Like
DOECARROT (Answer: DECORATOR)
PETRESCUE
TALKSENSH
FETIDSITE
GUNGIBILE
etc
In between walking the coastal paths of Cinque Terre in Northern Italy
I spent many hours at these, managing to solve about 15 of them. After
some time my thoughts turned towards cheating. I had my iPAQ 2210
Pocket PC with me, and it has Pocket Excel installed. It's very
limited by comparison with my PC's Excel 2000. No VBA macros for
example. But I set about trying to write a spreadsheet which would let
me enter e.g. PETRESCUE and see say 20 random anagrams, click a button
or press a key and see another 20, and so on. Even if not delivering
the answer itself (there are nearly 370,000 permutations of a 9
character word!), I thought it might be helpful. Rather like shuffling
your 7 Scrabble letters to get inspiration.
But I quickly came across what seemed an impossible hurdle. Using the
RAND() function (as part of this) inevitably gives a 'repetitive'
result. For example, if I developed 9 digit numbers (with the aim of
using them to shuffle the original 9 letters around), they would be
like 981245331, 123467238, 331245678, etc. IOW, one or more digits
would often be repeated.
So ... can anyone suggest a method of developing a set of 9 digit
numbers with *no* repetition? Or, of course, solving the problem
directly, i.e. developing a set of unique anagrams of a 9 character
string?
work out. Like
DOECARROT (Answer: DECORATOR)
PETRESCUE
TALKSENSH
FETIDSITE
GUNGIBILE
etc
In between walking the coastal paths of Cinque Terre in Northern Italy
I spent many hours at these, managing to solve about 15 of them. After
some time my thoughts turned towards cheating. I had my iPAQ 2210
Pocket PC with me, and it has Pocket Excel installed. It's very
limited by comparison with my PC's Excel 2000. No VBA macros for
example. But I set about trying to write a spreadsheet which would let
me enter e.g. PETRESCUE and see say 20 random anagrams, click a button
or press a key and see another 20, and so on. Even if not delivering
the answer itself (there are nearly 370,000 permutations of a 9
character word!), I thought it might be helpful. Rather like shuffling
your 7 Scrabble letters to get inspiration.
But I quickly came across what seemed an impossible hurdle. Using the
RAND() function (as part of this) inevitably gives a 'repetitive'
result. For example, if I developed 9 digit numbers (with the aim of
using them to shuffle the original 9 letters around), they would be
like 981245331, 123467238, 331245678, etc. IOW, one or more digits
would often be repeated.
So ... can anyone suggest a method of developing a set of 9 digit
numbers with *no* repetition? Or, of course, solving the problem
directly, i.e. developing a set of unique anagrams of a 9 character
string?