About the Five-Letter Words

In Volume 4 Fascicle 0 of Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, Knuth introduces a tool for exploring concepts in graph theory: the five-letter words. This is a collection …

About the Five-Letter Words

In Volume 4, Facsimile 0 of Donald Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, in which Knuth covers graph theory, he introduces a list of five-letter words as part of a data set useful in exploring graph theory and graph algorithms.

The list of words is part of the Stanford Graph Base, a set of data sets that are useful for studying graph theory and networks.

See Five Letter Words on the charlesreid1.com wiki for details.

Different by 1, Revisited

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NOTE: The code covered in this post uses Python 3. The scripts can be converted to Python 2 with minimal effort, but the author would encourage any user of Python 2 to "put on your big kid pants" and make the switch to Python 3. Let's all make this painful, drawn-out switch from Python 2 to Python 3 a thing of the past, shall we?

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• A Simple Manual Exmaple
• Pseudocode
• Python Code
• Output and Timing

Introduction

The letter/word coverage problem, as presented by Donald Knuth in Volume 4, Facicle 0 of his masterpiece Art of …

NOTE: The code covered in this post uses Python 3. The scripts can be converted to Python 2 with minimal effort, but the author would encourage any user of Python 2 to "put on your big kid pants" and make the switch to Python 3. Let's all make this painful, drawn-out switch from Python 2 to Python 3 a thing of the past, shall we?

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• Five-Letter Words with k Distinct Letters
  • Examining a Variation
• Lexicographic Ordering of Letters
  • Five-Letter Words with Lexicographically Ordered Letters
  • Five-Letter Words with Lexicographically Reversed Letters
• Finding Palindromes
  • Palindromes
  • Palindrome Pairs
  • Near …

NOTE: The code covered in this post uses Python 3. The scripts can be converted to Python 2 with minimal effort, but the author would encourage any user of Python 2 to "put on your big kid pants" and make the switch to Python 3. Let's all make this painful, drawn-out switch from Python 2 to Python 3 a thing of the past, shall we?

Table of Contents

• About the Five Letter Words
• The Usefulness of Five Letter Words
• Warm-Up Exercises
• Get Words Function
• Euclidean Distance
  • Euclidean Distance Code
  • Examples
  • Different-by-N Code
• Mo Words, Mo Problems
• References

About the Five-Letter …