From: Ruby Quiz <james@...>
Date: 2006-02-03T23:00:31+09:00
Subject: [QUIZ] Word Chains (#65)

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When someone asked for a set of exercises on Ruby Talk this week, one of the
answers was to check out the Code Katas by Dave Thomas.  I'm a big fan of those
problems myself, so let's do one of them.

This week's quiz is to write a program that takes two words as program
arguments.  The words will be the same length.  Please also support a -d
command-line option that can be used to switch dictionary files (one word per
line), but it's fine to use a reasonable default for your system.

The output of your program is to be a word chain, printing one word per line. 
The first word in the chain is the first argument to the program and the last
word is the other argument.  All other words in the chain vary by exactly one
letter from the words surrounding it.  If a chain can not be formed from the
arguments using the selected dictionary, print a simple error message.

Here are some sample runs of my solution, so you can see how chains look:

	$ ruby word_chain.rb work play
	work
	pork
	pory
	pony
	piny
	piky
	puky
	puly
	paly
	paty
	katy
	kath
	hath
	hash
	pash
	push
	puss
	poss
	post
	pout
	prut
	prat
	plat
	play
	$ ruby word_chain.rb lead gold
	lead
	load
	goad
	gold
	$ ruby word_chain.rb love hate
	love
	hove
	have
	hate

Aim for the shortest paths if you can find them (the above examples may not be
them) and fast running times.