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# five-letter-words
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This repository contains Donald Knuth's GraphBase list of five-letter words,
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as well as scripts to run various combinatoric experiments,
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graph algorithms, and other algorithms to explore the
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relationships among these words.
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The list of words comes from [[1]](http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/sgb.html) and is in the public domain.
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## Get Words
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A Python program that contains a method for getting all of the five letter words from a file,
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and that's about it.
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## Warm Up Exercises
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Exercises 26-37 of Knuth's Volume 4 Fascile 0 are intended as a warm up to get to know
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the SGB five letter word list. Solutions to these exercises are listed below.
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```distinct.py```- computes the number of SGB words containing exactly k distinct letters.
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```diff_by_one_fixed.py``` - (**fixed 2019-03-09**) computes the number of words in the SGB
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that are off by a single letter in each position. An example is `rover` and `spuds`.
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Each corresponding letter is only different by one: `r -> s`, `o->p`, and so on.
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This uses recursive backtracking to generate possible matches for each word, and
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uses a hash table to check for their existence in the original word set.
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There are 38 such pairs in the SGB.
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Also see [Five Letter Words](https://charlesreid1.com/wiki/Five_Letter_Words)
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on the charlesreid1.com wiki.
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```diff_by_n_fixed.py``` - (added 2019-03-10.) using the corrected approach (above) to
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computing differences by 1, this generalizes the calculation to words that are different
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by a distance `d` for each letter position.
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Also see [Five Letter Words: Part 4: Revisiting Diff by One](https://charlesreid1.github.io/five-letter-words-part-4-revisiting-diff-by-one.html)
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(blog post) on [charlesreid1.github.io](https://charlesreid1.github.io).
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```euclidean_distance.py``` - computes the euclidean distance between two words. This uses
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the traditional Euclidean distance definition but reinterprets distance to mean edit distance.
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```lexico.py``` - find words that are sorted by lexicographic order (front to back, a-z).
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```palindromes.py``` - look for five letter words that are either a palindrome, or a palindrome pair.
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### Variations
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```diff_by_n.py``` - computes words in SGB that have an edit distance of n.
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```reverse_lexico.py``` - variation on ```lexico.py``` that finds words whose letters are in
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reverse lexicographic order.
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## Letter Coverage
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```letter_coverage.py``` - computes coverage of the alphabet (minimum number of words required
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to provide X letters of the alphabet)
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Knuth mentions, in the text, a couple of facts about how many words cover how much
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of the alphabet. We authored a dynamic program to compute precisely this - given a
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number of letters N from the alphabet, this program computes the minimum number of
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words it takes to cover all N letters.
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Also see [Letter Coverage](https://charlesreid1.com/wiki/Letter_Coverage)
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page on the charlesreid1.com wiki.
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# Sources
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1. Knuth, Donald. <u>The Stanford GraphBase: A Platform for Combinatorial Computing</u>. New York: ACM Press, 1994.
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<[http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/sgb.html](http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/sgb.html)>
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