IMPORTANT: Please do not post solutions, hints, or other spoilers until at least 60 hours after the date of this message. Thanks. IMPORTANT: S'il vous plaît, attendez au minimum 60 heures après la date de ce message avant de poster solutions, indices ou autres révélations. Merci. BELANGRIJK: Stuur aub geen oplossingen, hints of andere tips in de eerste 60 uur na het verzendingstijdstip van dit bericht. Waarvoor dank. VNIMANIE: Pozhalujsta ne shlite reshenija, nameki na reshenija, i voobshe lyubye podskazki v techenie po krajnej mere 60 chasov ot daty etogo soobshenija. Spasibo. Qing3 Zhu4Yi4: Qing3 Ning2 Deng3Dao4 Jie1Dao4 Ben3 Xin4Xi2 Zhi1Hou4 60 Xiao3Shi2, Zai4 Fa1Biao3 Jie3Da2, Ti2Shi4, Huo4 Qi2Ta1 Hui4 Xie4Lou4 Da2An4 De5 Jian4Yi4. Xie4Xie4. ---------------------------------------------------------------- Last week I asked folks to write a program to generate acrostic puzzles, given a quotation and a source credit. (See http://perl.plover.com/qotw/e/025 for complete details.) Here's an example puzzle: ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 1G 2A 3C 4A 5B 6F 7C 8G 9E 10D 11G 12B 13E ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 14D 15G 16F 17E 18B 19B 20E 21D 22F 23A 24G 25C 26F 27G ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 28A 29F 30B 31G 32A 33G 34E 35D 36C 37B 38A 39D 40C A. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Fly headlong 2 4 38 28 32 23 B. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Where the sun comes up 19 18 12 30 5 37 C. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Relinquish 40 25 36 7 3 D. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Valuable property 39 10 21 35 14 E. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Dangerous 9 17 13 34 20 F. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Formerly yours 22 29 6 26 16 G. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ Why you're like your dad 15 8 24 11 27 33 1 31 There are two parts. The top part is a quotation; the bottom part is a list of clues and answer words. To solve the puzzle, you guess an answer word based on the clue and fill in its letters. You then transfer each letter to the corrspondingly-numbered space in the quotation. This may give you enough information to guess one of the words in the quotation; you can then transfer letters from the quotation back to the correspondingly-numbered spaces in the answer words. (For example, suppose you guess that the second word in the quotation is "BRAISING". Then you put an "R" into space 5B, and also into space 5 of answer word B in the bottom section.) The goal is to find the entire quotation. This type of puzzle is called an "acrostic" puzzle because the initial letters of the answer words spell the name of the author of the quotation, or the title of the source. Actually the puzzle is above not exactly the example I posted last week, because the example I posted contained several errors. I later posted a correction, which *also* contained several errors. Ouch! Although it is straightforward in principle to take a quotation and an appropriate list of answer words and to construct the puzzle, it turned out to be a lot trickier to actually do this than I thought it would be. I kept getting the letters confused. I also inserted several typos. Clearly, this is a task that is well-suited for a computer. This week, you'll write a program to format and print puzzles. The input to the program will be a file with two sections. The first section will be the quotation, and will be followed by a single blank line, and then the second section, which will be the list of answer words, one per line. A sample input: Paul Gray ... has always edited and improved my writings ... In return, I never mention his name unless somebody points out an error ... in which case I always say, "Paul Gray told me that." Ravish Organdy Bastion Earthy Rescind Transit Elysian Midspan Avow Company Hearty Odious Limp Lignum Eastern Rumple Nowise Enough Reliant Study Lawyer Atheism Wade Your program will emit an output analogous to the one at the beginning of this message. The letters in the quotation should be replaced by blanks; punctuation should be deleted. The blanks should be numbered consecutively, and each blank should be labeled with the corresponding letter of the answer word in which its letter appears. The bottom section of your puzzle should have blanks of the appropriate length for each answer word, and the blanks should be labeled with the appropriate numbers. Each number should appear exactly once in the upper section and once in the lower section. Each upper-section space should have the correct letter. Your program does not have to generate the clues themselves; those will be added later by a human. That is, it only should generate the G. ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ ___ 15 8 24 11 27 33 1 31 part of the answer section; it does not need to come up with "Why you're like your dad". An important quality factor is that the letters of an answer word should not be clumped together in the quotation; they should be spread out to appear in many different words in the quotation, and vice versa. If there are more than 26 answer words, it is traditional to label them "AA", "BB", and so on. The example quotation above is an abridged version of the following: Much of what I write was suggested by Paul Gray, and in all cases, he has always edited and improved my writings before they are published. In return, I never mention his name unless somebody points out an error in one of my publications, in which case I always say, "Paul Gray told me that." -- Robert E. Machol, "Lerner's Law". _OR/MS Today_, 1998 "Lerner's Law", according to Dr. Machol, is "no good deed goes unpunished."