A certain word has thirteen letters.

1) Each pair of letters below consists of one letter contained in the word and one "other" letter.

A | B  | C | D | E | F | G | H |  I  | J | L | S | Y |
V | W | Q | M | K | U | N | P | O  | R | X | T | Z |

2) When each "other" letter is put beneath each letter in the word, the "other" letters will appear in alphabetical order.

3) The word has the same number of letters in common with each of the following words:

                     FACE  QUEST  QUICK  SWITCH  WORLD

What is the word?

The following program finds only the word "unpredictably", using only the first two clues. The third clue does check out, with 3 letters in common when paired with any of the five words given.

DATA av,bw,cq,dm,ek,fu,gn,hp,io,jr,lx,st,yz
DIM pair(13) AS STRING, other(13) AS STRING
FOR i = 1 TO 13: READ pair(i): NEXT

OPEN "\words\words13.txt" FOR BINARY AS #1
w$ = SPACE$(13)
DO
  GET #1, , w$
  IF EOF(1) THEN EXIT DO
  FOR p = 1 TO LEN(w$)
    l$ = MID$(w$, p, 1)
    FOR i = 1 TO 13
      ix = INSTR(pair(i), l$)
      IF ix THEN
        other(p) = MID$(pair(i), 3 - ix, 1): EXIT FOR
      END IF
    NEXT
  NEXT p
  good = 1
  FOR i = 1 TO 12
    IF other(i + 1) <= other(i) THEN good = 0: EXIT FOR
  NEXT
  IF good THEN PRINT w$
LOOP
CLOSE

 

Posted by Charlie on 2012-03-29 11:51:04