Jumble
March 1, 2019
Last week I gave a rather silly solution to the Scrabble problem. Today’s exercise is my penance for that silliness.
As I’ve mentioned previously, my day job is on a team of programmers that supports our enterprise-wide computer system. I sit in a cube farm, where there is neither audible nor visual privacy. We recently hired a new programmer to replace a retiring team member, and he has a daily calendar on his desk that provides a jumbled series of letters that you have to rearrange to form a word. Yesterday’s puzzle was L T E A D E; most of the puzzles I solve in a few seconds, but that one took several minutes. The calendar appears to have a flaw: the solutions, one day after the next, are in alphabetical order, so I know before I start that the first letter will be E.
Your task is to write a program that solves jumbles. 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 