The program I have is really hit and miss, it can run all day without finding a solution, or it can find one in 5 minutes. This solution required only 75k iterations (fast).

Having run the program all day without solutions, I'm wondering if it's been proven that all sentence beginnings have a solution. <p< I'll clean up the code a bit and post it later.

MetaFoo

Maybe the question should be rephrased like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

   use strict;

   my $str = "Do any Perlmonks know of a sentence made with
              five a's, one b, two c's, four d's, thirty-three e's,
              six f's, two g's, nine h's, ten i's, one j, three k's,
              two l's, three m's, twenty-one n's, sixteen o's,
              two p's, one q, ten r's, twenty-eight s's,
              twenty-five t's, three u's, three v's, ten w's,
              four x's, six y's, and one z?";

   for my $ch ('a'..'z') {
      my $num = (() = $str =~ m{$ch}ig);
      print "$ch $num\n";
   }
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