The first 26 primes (2, 3, 5, ...) can be put in correspondence with the letters A through Z, so the common English word CAB would be the product 5 * 2 * 3 = 30. Using this code, what´s your guess to a common English word that comes closest to a million ? I found one very, very close. Can you beat mine ?

To help you, here are the 26 first primes and their correspondence to the alphabet :

 2 - A      3 - B      5 - C      7 - D     11 - E
13 - F     17 - G     19 - H     23 - I     29 - J
31 - K     37 - L     41 - M     43 - N     47 - O
53 - P     59 - Q     61 - R     67 - S     71 - T
73 - U     79 - V     83 - W     89 - X     97 - Y     101 - Z

(In reply to re: computer soln -- spoiler by Penny)

Hey, Penny. I came up with PANACEA manually using factors of numbers around 1000000 so I’m pretty happy that your program placed it 7^th. I don’t have a dictionary file available here at work (which is the only time I get to play at perplexus). Can you suggest where I can get hold of such a file?

Posted by Nosher on 2005-07-19 02:16:56