Programming Praxis

I like to read a web site called Career Cup, both to enjoy solving some of the programming exercise given there and to find exercise for Programming Praxis. As I write this exercise, here are the two most recent exercises on Career Cup:

• Given a function rand2 that returns 0 or 1 with equal probability, write a function rand3 that returns 0, 1 or 2 with equal probability, using only rand2 as a source of random numbers.
• Given a set of characters and a dictionary of words, find the shortest word in the dictionary that contains all of the characters in the set. In case of a tie, return all the words of the same (shortest) length.

Your task is to write the two programs described above. 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.

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