From: Francois Paul <francois@...>
Date: 2005-08-26T23:03:00+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Word Chains (#44)

does anyone have a working link for the wordlist.txt dictionary that 
Dave links (broken) to from codekata?

Ruby Quiz wrote:

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>-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>
>Our own Dave Thomas has also posted some Ruby code challenges on his blog in the
>past.  There are several interesting problems there:
>
>	http://codekata.org/
>
>This week's Ruby Quiz is one of my favorite problems posted by Dave.
>
>Given two words of equal length as command-line arguments, build a chain of
>words connecting the first to the second.  Each word in the chain must be in the
>dictionary and every step along the chain changes exactly one letter from the
>previous word.
>
>Again, your program should accept input as two command-line arguments.  Your
>program should also allow a -d command-line switch followed by a dictionary file
>to use, but feel free to choose a sensible default for your system.  The result
>should be a word chain starting with the first word and ending with the last
>printed to STDOUT, one word per line.  Print an error message if a chain cannot
>be found.
>
>Bonus points for finding the shortest chain and/or a small execution time.
>
>Here's an example:
>
>	$ time ruby -d word_chain.rb duck ruby
>	Loading dictionary...
>	Building chain...
>	duck
>	ruck
>	rusk
>	ruse
>	rube
>	ruby
>	
>	real    0m27.551s
>	user    0m27.402s
>	sys     0m0.113s
>
>
>  
>