#willshortz

Do you listen to Sunday Puzzle? It’s a weekly NPR podcast hosted by Will Shortz. Each week, the show has a quiz followed by a puzzle for listeners. Here was this week’s puzzle:

Name a state capital. Drop one of its letters. The remaining letters can be rearranged to name of another major city in the United States. What is it? There are two different answers, and you should find both of them.

Of course, achieving peak nerd, Curt and I thought that this would be a fun thing to code. Here’s what I came up with.

First, I found two lists. One of all state capitals, and another of the top 5,000 cities in the United States by population. Next, I looped through each capital city to find cities that were one letter shorter. I used the adist function to compare how different a capital and any given city were. Finally, I printed out all the cities and capitals that only differed by one letter. After a bunch of fussing ( I forgot to make all letters lowercase, for example), I got a total of five answers. Booya! Science. Curt also solved in C++ and got the same answers.

Check out the answer here (spoilers!!!!!!) :

http://rpubs.com/gkcharles/133461

and here are the city files in case you want to try it on your own :)

https://www.scribd.com/doc/292544591/Cities