Here is a proposal - are people interested?
Piers and I were playing a little word game on IRC, you will no
doubt be familiar with it. The game has a start word and a finish
word and you have to move from the start word to the finish word
by changing one letter at a time. So to move from BOAT to ROAD,
the solution might be,
BOAT
BOAR
ROAR
ROAD
So here is the challenge. You have to write a Perl program that takes
two arguments, the first is the start word and the second is the finish
word. The Perl program will then use /usr/dict/words to find
the shortest word chain between the words. The winning program
will be the one that solves the problem the fastest over 3 different
tests. There is a limit on the source code size of 10k, to prevent people
preconfiguring datasets in the source.
The winner will get the title, "London.pm Programmer of the Month"
Greg
--
Greg McCarroll http://217.34.97.146/~gem/
