A place in the alphabet

2018-11-09

For the holidays in 2018, Will Shortz, crossword editor at The New York Times, challenged readers to be part of the NYT’s special Puzzle Mania! section.

Dear Puzzler,

This is Will Shortz, crossword editor at The New York Times.

During the past two years, just before Christmas, The Times has published a special section devoted to puzzles called “Puzzle Mania!”

Now we’re preparing a new “Puzzle Mania!” section, which will appear on Sunday, Dec. 16, and we’d like to invite you to participate by helping us create a puzzle that will appear in this year’s “Puzzle Mania!”

The challenge

The challenge was to write a sentence in which the place in the alphabet of the first letter of each word is the same as that word’s length. In other words, if a one-letter word is used, it has to be “a”; a two-letter word has to start with “b”; a three-letter word has to start with “c” etc.

Examples:

• Historic Essen, Germany, digs modernization.
• Georgia highways can be horrible every Friday.
• Interview a daft lexicologist!

Implementation

I’m a software engineer. I figured it couldn’t be too hard to write some code to check if a word is valid. This is what I came up with:

/**
 * Validates a word by checking that its length is equal to
 * the alphabetical position of its fist letter.
 */
function checkWord(word) {
  const charCodeOffset = 97;
  const firstLetterCharCode = word.toLowerCase().charCodeAt(0);
  const firstLetterAlphabetPos = firstLetterCharCode - charCodeOffset + 1;

  return firstLetterAlphabetPos === word.length;
}

Now I just need words to test. Turns out that there’s an exhaustive list of English language words available on GitHub.

After downloading words.txt, I now have a list of English words, but somehow I need to pipe them through my validator. I’ve worked with Node.js streams before, but this was my first time implementing a transform stream.

The following will pipe words.txt as chunks into a custom stream transformer I wrote, validate each word, and then write all valid words to words_valid.txt:

const fs = require('fs');
const { Transform } = require('stream');

const filterWords = new Transform({
  transform(chunk, encoding, callback) {
    // Split each line into an array of words.
    const words = chunk.toString().split('\r\n');

    words.forEach((word) => {
      // There are some words in the list that have weird
      // punctuation, like "b-". Let's avoid those.
      if (!/!(\w|\.)/.test(word)) {
        if (checkWord(word)) {
          this.push(word);
          this.push('\n');
        }
      }
    });

    callback();
  }
});

const readable = fs.createReadStream('./words.txt');
const writable = fs.createWriteStream('./words_valid.txt');

readable.pipe(filterWords).pipe(writable);

Now I have a list of words that we can use to try to form sentences for Puzzle Mania! Here are a few interesting words my program found:

puzzleheadedness, retroconsciousness, straightforwardness

The longest valid word:

undistinguishableness

And here’s the best sentence I came up with:

Intricate flames glowing magnificently.

Not too shabby. I never did end up submitting it, but I did take this one step further: what if I only limited myself to words tweeted by @realDonaldTrump? He does have the best words after all.

Trump tweets

I found a website which compiled all of Mr. Trump’s tweets in a consumable format, so I downloaded them and parsed through the file using a similar algorithm to the one above.

Since it was in JSON format, however, I didn’t need to use transform streams, just a simple Array.reduce() sufficed.

While I was at it, I also decided to extract all valid at-mentions (@) and hashtags (#).

const fs = require('fs');
const tweets = require('./trump-tweets');

const words = tweets.reduce((acc, { text }) => {
  // Find all matching words, not including mentions
  // and hashtags. Ignore all words starting with any
  // character other than a-ZA-Z, @, or #.
  const matches = text.match(/\s([a-zA-Z@#]\S*\b)/g);

  if (matches) {
    matches.forEach((match) => {
      // Extract just the word portion of the match (i.e.,
      // strip the @ or # if present).
      const word = match.match(/\w+/)[0];

      // Check that the word is valid and has not already
      // been found.
      if (checkWord(word) && !acc.includes(match)) {
        acc.push(match);
      }
    });
  }

  return acc;
}, []);

words.sort((a, b) => {
  return a.toLowerCase() < b.toLowerCase() ? -1 : 1;
});

fs.writeFileSync('./trump-words.txt', `${words.join('\n')}\n`);

In total, I found 2,006 valid “words” (misspellings, abbreviations, hyperbole, etc.), 629 valid mentions, and 82 valid hashtags. In the end, I managed to come up with the following valid sentences:

hahahaha goodbye @SenatorJeffSessions! #PlayTheTrumpCard

Fueled by ignorance: #MeetTheTrumps

DACA favors immigrant interests

Most of Mr. Trump’s vocabulary leans pretty negative, but I was still able to construct at least one positive sentence:

A genuine future every family can enjoy #hardwork

So yeah, all in all: pretty fun little project.