My friend's daughter got a family assignment from school to commemorate 100th day in school. If each letter in the English alphabet is assigned a weight corresponding to it's position (e.g. "a" is 1, "b" is 2, ... "z" is 26) then she was supposed to collect 10 words whose letters sum total to 100.

They spent last 1.5 days and found only 3 words and were discussing the problem at the lunch table earlier today. Here is a small piece of code that I wrote to help them out:

import java.io.BufferedReader;
import java.io.FileReader;
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.StringTokenizer;

public class Main {
    private static final char[] WEIGHT = {
        'a', 'b', 'c', 'd', 'e', 'f', 'g', 'h', 'i', 'j', 'k',
        'l', 'm', 'n', 'o', 'p', 'q', 'r', 's', 't', 'u', 'v',
        'w', 'x', 'y', 'z'
    };

    /**
    * @param args the command line arguments
    */
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        if (args.length == 0) {
            System.out.println("At least one argument required");
            return;
        }
        BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(new FileReader(args[0]));
        String string = in.readLine();
        while (string != null) {
            StringTokenizer tokenizer = new StringTokenizer(string);
            while (tokenizer.hasMoreTokens()) {
                String word = tokenizer.nextToken();
                if (wordStrength(word) == 100)
                System.out.println("100 letters old: " + word);
            }
            string = in.readLine();
        }
    }

    static int wordStrength(String word) {
        int strength = 0;
        for (int i=0; i<word.length(); i++) {
            int charStrength = Arrays.binarySearch(WEIGHT, word.charAt(i));
            if (charStrength >= 0)
                strength += charStrength+1;
            }
            return strength;
        }
    }
}

This application was easily created using NetBeans 6. And then I copy/pasted articles from my favorite news sites in a file, passed it as command-line argument by right-clicking the project, selecting "Properties" and specifying the file name in "Arguments".

Hit F6, and voila got more than 10 words :)

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