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How to Solve Will's Puzzle With Code

Duck soup! My electronic gum-shoe work pumped lead into that whodunit. Which is kinda good, on account of how last week Will made me grab some sky! I got myself a list of good fellas, wise guys, flimflam artists, outlaws, torpedoes and various villains, gave them all the third degree, and spat out an answer.

Algorithm Summary

• Build a dictionary of criminal names such as 'cutpurse' and 'stickup artist'
• I chose to use a dictionary (a type of hash table in .NET) which is quite easy to check whether or not something, such as a criminal name, is in the dictionary
• Look at each class of criminal (iterate the dictionary) and construct candidate variatons according to Will's instructions. s.
• Check whether any candidate is in our criminals dictionary, if so, we have a solution!

The most interesting part was getting a list of lawbreakers. I had to build my own list, and it was fun dealing with various slang terms such as goons, gunsels, grifters etc. My favorite site was a list of criminal slang from Dashiel Hammet, Phillip Marlowe et. al., Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang.

Together with a few other sites, I managed to compile a list of 113 terms for miscellaneous made men and molls. If you download my code, you can take a look at the text file that resulted.

Take a look at this code sample, which is probably as easy to read as any explanation:

//Examine each entry in the dictionaryn the dictionary
foreach (KeyValuePair<string, char> criminalPair in criminalsDic) {
    string criminal = criminalPair.Key;
    //if it has an 's', do something
    int p = criminal.IndexOf("s");
    if (p >= 0) {
        //build all the possible combinations of the word by 1)removing the 's' and 
        //2) removing other potential letters
        for (int i = 0; i < criminal.Length - 1; i++) {
            string candidate = criminal.Remove(p, 1).Remove(i, 1);

            if (criminalsDic.ContainsKey(candidate)) {
                lstResults.Items.Add(candidate + " - " + criminal);
            }
        }
    }
}

I ommitted the code to load the dictionary, since it was really simple. Here's a few comments on the code above:

• The following code looks for a criminal name having 's' in its name:
  int p = criminal.IndexOf("s"); if (p >= 0) {...
• It is very easy to construct variations on the word using the Remove method, which simply removes the letter we don't want
• Once we have made candidate by removing letters, we check whether it is in our list with if (criminalsDic.ContainsKey(candidate)), a test which evaluates as true if the candidate exists in the dictionary.

Click to download my C# solution code, including the list of lawbreakers, found in the bin/debug subdirectory.

 Got a solution in your own language? Post a comment to that effect and I may post your code on line.

Solve the Problem Now!

By clicking the button, you will run a small javascript program in your browser to solve the problem. It needs to fetch the lawbreaker list from the server, and then it should solve the problem in a few seconds. If you're curious, inspect the page source code! (Search for "function dataFetched".)

Take-Home Challenge!

Can you can write your own code to solve a similar problem? Think of a name for criminal, involving fraud. Drop a 'B', add an 'L', and rearrange the letters to create another kind of criminal. Post a comment if you can do it.

If you like, you can modify my code to accomplish this purpose; in any event, if you use my download, you can use my text files for the criminal list.