Wham! Bam! Anagrams!

Computer Science Level 5

Along came the rap fairy

With a Unix dictionary .

Seekers solve his riddles nary.

"If you surpass my mental trap, I will grant you power to rap. Words are the weapon that I wield, how many anagrams does one sword yield?

As for the length of your sword, do not use 6 letters or more.

There's one more part, and just one more: What's ten times this number, then its floor?"

Details and assumptions:

  • An anagram is the result of rearranging the letters of a word to produce a new word.
  • Do not count words with apostrophes ( ' ).
  • Make sure to make the words lowercase.
  • A word cannot be an anagram of itself; i.e. - "god" is an anagram of "dog", but "dog" is not an anagram of "dog".
  • Only count words with 5 letters or less.
  • Take the mean, not the mode.
  • Use the Unix dictionary . (Brilliant hosted)


The answer is 6.

View wiki
Brock Brown by Brock Brown , 25, USA

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1 solution

Brock Brown
May 25, 2015

Python 2.7: 

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from itertools import permutations
import random
from time import time
from math import floor
words = set()
for word in open("words",'r').read().split("\n"):
    if "'" in word or word == '' or len(word) > 5:
        continue
    words.add(word.lower())
def anagrams(word):
    found = set()
    for combo in permutations(word, len(word)):
        if ''.join(combo) in words:
            found.add(''.join(combo))
    return found
total = 0.0
trials = 0
end = time() + 60
while time() < end:
    random_word = random.sample(words, 1)[0]
    total += len(anagrams(random_word)) - 1
    trials += 1
print "Answer:", floor(10*(total/trials))

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