Day: 06/27/2003

Kata 6

/ joeygibson

I took a swipe at implementing Dave Thomas’ Kata 6 which is an assignment dealing with anagrams. The goal is to parse a list of 45000-ish words, finding all the words that are anagrams of other words in the file. Dave claims there are 2,530 sets of anagrams, but I only got 2,506. I’m not sure where the disconnect is, but here’s my solution. I welcome any comments and critiques. 

 words = IO.readlines("wordlist.txt")  anagrams = Hash.new([])  words.each do |word|     base = Array.new     word.chomp!.downcase!      word.each_byte do |byte|         base << byte.chr     end      base.sort!      anagrams[base.to_s] |= [word] end  # Find the anagrams by eliminating those with only one word anagrams.reject! {|k, v| v.length == 1}  values = anagrams.values.sort do |a, b|     b.length  a.length end  File.open("anagrams.txt", "w") do |file|     values.each do |line|         file.puts(line.join(", "))     end end  largest = anagrams.keys.max do |a, b|     a.length  b.length end  puts "Total: #{anagrams.length}" # puts "Largest set of anagrams: #{values[0].inspect}" #  print "Longest anagram: #{anagrams[largest].inspect} " #  puts "at #{largest.length} characters each"

Update: Of course, 10 seconds after uploading the code, I see something I could change. Instead of sorting the anagram hash descending by array length, I could have done the following: 

 longest = anagrams.to_a.max do |a, b|     a[1].length  b[1].length end

This will sort and pull the largest one off. The key is bucket 0 and the interesting array is in bucket 1.

The Food Industry Strikes Back

/ joeygibson

In an effort to inform and entertain people about the spate of ridiculous lawsuits being filed by lard-asses against McDonald’s and other food makers for “making people fat”, a food industry group is launching a series of ads that mock the lawsuits. This Washington Times article has the details. Here’s a funny snippet:

The parodies start with “According to the latest study,” and continue with absurd claims such as “If you eat a wheelbarrow full of cheese fries each week, the cheese fries are to blame when people call you Big Daddy Largepants.”

Come on, folks! Take responsibility for the size of your ass! I’ve taken responsibility for mine! Join Weight Watchers, go on the Atkins Diet, get in The Zone. Just do something! It’s your fault that you are fat, not the people who make the food!