06-08-2007, 09:45 AM
|
|
Thinker
Join Date: Sep 2003
Posts: 414
|
|
Pocket Excel guru?
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 the evenings, in between walking the coastal paths of Cinque Terre in Northern Italy, I spent far too 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 seems a major obstacle. 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?
--
Terry, West Sussex, UK
|
| |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Threaded Mode