Anonymous Monk has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

I am looking for folks that might be interested in helping me solve a puzzle. I was working on it off and on for years, and someone suggested I learn perl as a way to make progress. I learned just enough perl to know what might be done, but really would benefit from experts contributing.

The trick I think may lay in craftiness with regular expressions, or it may not. In any case, I'd welcome your ideas, or interest. If I get a few people interested, we could do a google hangout to discuss possible directions. Take a look at how I've laid out the problem, see if you might want to collaborate or please do pass it along if you think someone you know might want to get involved. simplemathteam.wordpress.com

Thanks!

Ali

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re: Looking for problem-solving help
by hdb (Monsignor) on Jan 15, 2014 at 07:03 UTC

    Having a quick scan of your problem description on simplemathteam.wordpress.com, I would think that Perl is a really useful tool to solve the puzzle you pose. I would try, given a dictionary of English words:

    • Based on string4, look for 6 letter words with the same letter in positions 3 and 4 and another one (or the same) in positions 1 and 5.
    • See whether I find 7 letter words with the same letter in positions 3 and 4 for string3.
    • Find words for strings 1 and 2 that fit to all possible choices for the above.

    Perl is an excellent tool to do this!

    What I find rather demotivating to offer you some more technical details is the fact that in simplemathteam.wordpress.com, you offer no link to the original encrypted text. So it is not clear what I would be helping you to achieve.

    Update: Trying this strategy on 2of12inf from 12dicts does not find a solution for your problem. Issue is string2 which cannot be matched to any choices of string3 and string4. Interestingly, there are only 3 words to match string3. Hope this is helpful.

    Update 2: Actually, re-reading your problem description, you are also looking at parts of English words, not complete words. Apologies for not reading in more detail. For that, one finds a lot of solutions.

    Update 3: I do get ~1000 different combinations of 13 letters that can be covered with words from the dictionary. I am not taking into account cases where the end of one word and the beginning of another could cover the patterns.

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Re: Looking for problem-solving help
by GrandFather (Saint) on Jan 15, 2014 at 01:39 UTC

    I suggest you outline the problem here. Perlmonks' focus is on assisting people with Perl, not on solving arbitrary programming challenges so if it's not Perl help you are looking for you are most likely looking in the wrong place.

    True laziness is hard work
[reply]

      Thank you for the feedback. I will have to dig up my trial programs and return to the forum with specific technical questions.

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