From fp Wed Feb  4 23:54:00 1998
Message-ID: <19980204235400.53720@rose.fpp.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de>
Date: Wed, 4 Feb 1998 23:54:00 +0100
From: Frank Pilhofer <fp@***************************>
To: *****tdv.com, ****tdv.com, **********tdv.com,
        **********starlightlines.com, **********starshiptitanic.com,
        *******tdv.com
Subject: The Anti-Alphabetiser
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   Dear Folks,

 I have truly enjoyed reading the Starship Titanic novel on your Web
pages. An exciting read, even better than the telephone dictionary
which I'd finished just a few days earlier. Yet even you must admit
that the telephone dictionary's cast was mind-boggling.
 Of course I was disappointed that you kept the book's ending for
yourself, but I've thought up a pretty good ending myself:

  zeal zebra zenith zero zest zigzag zip zodiac zone zoo

 Actually, these are all of my German-English dictionary's entries
for `z', but still they have a nice touch. I especially like the
introduction of the zebra, even though its personality isn't really
explored beyond its general zealousness.
 Or was this question to guess the conclusion just a cunning trick
on your part? I haven't yet seen the novel in print, so who grants
me that you don't simply steal my ending and use it in the book?
Maybe I should actually buy one to check.
 Then again, why should I, after already reading it.

 Of course I've also reengineered the novel into its original form
with the `Anti-Alphabetiser' program attached below. It's written
in Tcl, not Perl, which makes it slightly less elegant and less
incomprehensible. As is, the program reads (alphabetised) text
with punctuations-in-place from the standard input and produces
all possible permutations.
 It may look a little long, but the central function `antipipa_rek'
is 15 lines short. Some of the rest is necessary to set everything
up, and a large portion of the code simply computes the number of
possible permutations.
 Note that the program optimizes by generating a list of unique
words, and therefore does not produce identical permutations.

 To reverse-engineer the Starship Titanic novel, all you need is
a little time. It contains 51673 words, of which 6566 are unique.
This totals a mere 1.71696200256 * 10^146445 permutations.

 You might be interested in my Googolplex Web page,
  http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/~fp/Tools/Googool.html
on which I present a program that prints a Googolplex, complete
with proof that it is pointless to run the program now, because
in two years there will be hardware that can run the program in
half the time and would finish first.
 Of course, this theorem obviously doesn't apply here, as the
number of possibilities is a lot smaller than a Googolplex.
Still, I would recommend not feeding this problem to an Eddie
shipboard computer while being shot at by Vogons, if only in
consideration of the necessary amount of ticker-tape.

 Given more time I could have optimized the program to only
consider proper english sentences, or I could have written a
parallel program to spread the joy of jamming computers all
over the world, but it seems silly optimizing a program that
any serious computer would only smile about.

 I have also wrapped the Anti-Alphabetizer in a CGI script, which
you can try at
  http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/~fp/titanic/
 Perhaps we should make both programs talk to each other, eliminating
the need for a user inbetween.

 Oh, and please forgive me mailing this to several of your email
addresses (some of which are probably bogus), but you didn't mention
where to send such efforts.

 Have fun,
        Frank

--
 + Frank Pilhofer                        fp*informatik.uni-frankfurt.de  +
 |                                      http://www.uni-frankfurt.de/~fp/ |
 +---- Life would be a very great deal less weird without you.  - DA ----+