TiVo's and other DVR's, such as those provided by the Cable TV company, allow searches for programs using an on-screen alphabet that you can move through using up, down, left and right buttons so you can select a letter with the enter button, then go on to select the next letter, etc.

One such alphabetic layout is as follows:

ABCD
EFGH
IJKL
MNOP
QRST
UVWX
YZ

The cursor always starts at A before the first letter of the word is typed. There is no wrap-around, so you can't go from A to Y in one step, nor from X to U in one step, and you can't go down from W or X, or right from Z.

Typing THIRTY using the above layout requires 30 button presses: DDDDRRR=UUU=LLLD=DDR=RR=LLLDD=, here using the = to represent Enter, and initial letters to represent Up, Down, Left, Right.

Suppose a different DVR has a different number of letters in each row. Using that DVR, with more letters per row, the word LOW can be typed in 12 or fewer button presses. On this same DVR, there are three number words (such as EIGHT, EIGHTEEN or EIGHTY, but those are just examples, not the answer) which also require 12 or fewer button presses each.

How many letters are there on a line on this other DVR, and what are the three numbers that can be spelled with 12 or fewer button presses each?

The solution is still 9 letters on a line, and the numbers (glad to see my correction from "numerals") are still ONE, TWO, and TEN.  You have helpfully added the clarification to prevent wrap-around sequences. Hope Susan isn't looking!

As noted in 1508, it is still not clear how the cursor gets back to "A" to start a new word.  I'll look at the earlier post on this one after I've posted.

 

Posted by ed bottemiller on 2008-09-15 15:24:53