Optimal Alphabetical Order
May 14, 2013
Today’s exercise comes from the book Making the Alphabet Dance: Recreational Wordplay by Ross Eckler, but I found it at http://www.math.cmu.edu/~bkell/alpha-order/:
Assume we have a list of all the words in the English language. Under the normal ordering of the alphabet in English (A, B, C, …, Z), some number of these words have all their letters in alphabetical order (for example, DEEP, FLUX, and CHIMPS). However, if we change the ordering of the alphabet, we will change the number of words having their letters in “alphabetical” order. What arrangement of the letters of the alphabet maximizes this number?
Your task is to write a program to find such an arrangement. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.
Programming Praxis 