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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!bellcore!decvax!genrad!panda!talcott!harvard!seismo!hao!ames!jaw
From: jaw@ames.UUCP (James A. Woods)
Newsgroups: net.puzzle
Subject: Re: Alphabet soup
Message-ID: <999@ames.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 20-May-85 16:49:59 EDT
Article-I.D.: ames.999
Posted: Mon May 20 16:49:59 1985
Date-Received: Thu, 23-May-85 03:27:58 EDT
References: <5370@ucla-cs.ARPA>
Organization: NASA-Ames Research Center, Mtn. View, CA
Lines: 30

# A is for Amy who fell down the stairs,
  B is for Basil assaulted by bears...
     -- "Gashlycrumb Tinies" excerpt, Edward St. John Gorey

> What is the current record for shortest meaningful sentence that uses all the
> letters of the alphabet?  

     Guess you missed all the hoopla last year in the annals of net.puzzle
about the minimal English pangram:

	Jocks vend, fix, quartz BMW glyph.

which can loosely be interpreted as the destiny of a certain hood ornament
curio sold at a fraternity garage sale.

     This was discovered by postprocessing some VAX 11/750 output after
running about six CPU hours of very optimized C code.  If you're interested
in the original postings, or want my paper on the anagram algorithm,
send a note this way.  Of course, human-concocted phrases like this have
been done before -- see the Guinness book, or better yet, "Palindromes
and Anagrams" by Bergerson [Dover, 1973].

     On a similar topic, kudos to Guy Jacobson for the minimal (?)
ordered alphaset containment code.  The relaxed version of the original
puzzle looks interesting, too.  By changing a routine in my anagram program,
I believe I can get some answers on this one, though I'm not sure they'll
beat the 4-word posting.  More fun for "web2" on a Cray (when do I
get that account on the 2, Seymour?).  Stay tuned ...

     -- James A. Woods    ames!jaw   or, jaw@riacs