There are 26 letters in the alphabet, number each in order 1-26 (i.e.
A=1, B=2, C=3...Y=25, Z=26).
Separate the number 15009166 into individual letters comprising a
single word.  My question is, what is the corresponding word to solve
this puzzle?

Hello.

As Murph points out below, it's not possible to parse 15009166 as
given into any kind of solution because of the repeating 00s (i.e., no
letter corresponds to either zero or 50). It's only possible to arrive
at a solution by rearranging the number.

15009166 may be rearranged as 16091605, which may be parsed as:
16 09 16 05 which correspond to:
P  I  P  E

So that's my answer: pipe.

search strategy: racked my brain

I hope this is right.

---

Request for Answer Clarification by denverd-ga on 25 Jul 2002 20:08 PDT

Ok.  I went through & rechecked all of my math leading up to the final
answer & found where I missed a number, which of course threw off
everything after that.  The new, & hopefully correct, # to make a word
out, follwing the previously posted directions, is 15284476.

Thanks

---

Clarification of Answer by juggler-ga on 25 Jul 2002 21:58 PDT

denverd:
Could you post the complete instructions for this puzzle, including
the math problems that you've mentioned?
Thanks

Good answer but it is not correct.  I submitted "pipe" as my answer it
came back as incorrect.  I am going to recehck my math for the prolems
which led to the "15009166" number & repost.  Thanks for the help.

Hi Denverd,

When trying to separate 15009166 into letters, I tried
the following approaches. None yields a nice english word.

The most likely encoding would be the following
algorithm: result = 0; for each letter in word,
multiply result with 27, then add letter value to
result. repeat. This gives 'AAFNSA' which is
not a word I recognize ;-)

Base 27 (values 1-26): 01 01 06 14 19 01
                       A  A  F  N  S  A
looks interesting, though not useful.


Encoding in base 26 would be more efficient,
however, the result in this case looks random,
and it does not match the assigned letter values.

Base 26 (values 0-25): 01 06 21 24 23 16
                       B  G  U  Y  X  Q
not useful


Encoding of the letters could also have happened with
an arbitrary larger number. Sometimes, primes are used,
but this is not the case here.

Factorization: 2*1291*5813
not useful

Unlikely hypothesis: Sum of the letters.
This would be a word with at least 577275 letters, and letter
order is arbitrary.

Other bases: I tried the search with all bases from 25 to 100,
but none yields valid results (e.g. coefficients all lower than
27, and a nice word)

Do you have any additional information about the encoding?

If ASNFAA (or AAFNSA) is indeed the 'word' you are looking for,
please say so. It is intersting that base 27 is the last one
yielding a 6 character word. Base 28 already only results in 5
letters. That makes this encoding at least probable...

At a first look i'd say this puzzle was impossible.
Starting at the left, it could be "1,5" or "15" because "1,50" is to
high.
this gives you either Ae as a start or O. But then you just have 00
which isn't on the chart, followed by 9 which is I and either A or P
then f.
Aeiaff? aeipf? oiaff? oipg? obvisly not!

At this point i strongly urge you to recheck the exacy wording of your
source.

Now lets look at the wording of the questing 'Comprising' dosn't mean
in order, does it? So lets see...

None of the combinations i came up with earlier resulted in words
(according to my spell checker thing. Franklin spelling ace)

Maybe you have to reorder the numbers? Now it'll get complicated!

The Numbers 0 must be used as the second number, so they HAVE to be
two 10's with the numbers 1. So then theres two J's in your word.
Leaving you with E,I,F,F for other letters, which again is no answers.

Keep trying!
-Matt

My thoughts are this:
Here is how you could be it (and if I were so inclined about two hours
of programming could pull it off).
1)First chop the big number into unique (meaning we haven't tried this
grouping..) bundles of one or two digits: like so 1  50  0  9 .. you
get the idea...
2) Check to see if all numbers fall with a band of 26 (meaning no
bundle is more or less than 26 of any other bundle)  if yes goto step
3, if not go back to step 1 to try differant unique bundling of digits
beacuse this set cannot fit the rule of consecutive ordering
3) subract the lowest value of all the digits from each digit ( you
should get at least one value of zero..).. So 3, 7, 12, 3 would become
0, 4, 9, 0
4) place the above zero indexed template on the alpahabet-- lining up
the zero with the "a", and so on.. In the above example we would get A
(from the zero), e (from the 4), J (from the 9), and A again from the
zero.
5) Do the letters form a word? if yes.. your done, if no, go back to
step 4 but shift all the numbers in the template up one digit (in our
example the template becomes 1,5,9,1, then place on the alphabet
again.
6) if you do step 5 until the highest number in the template hits 26
(it must take less steps than 26 to do this unless the whole word
consists of the same letter.) and still no word.. then the numbers
cannot form a word.

I wrote this comment for fun since I wrote a program about two months
ago that figures out the longest word in the English language that you
can re-arrange the letters and form another word  :->

I would like to post a comment apologizing to juggler-ga for the
answer rating.  I am new to this board & should have read the FAQ &
requested a clarification first.  2* did not reflect the answer given,
only that the answer was not correct, which again looks to be my own
fault.

So when you give the wrong numbers, and it produces the wrong answer,
that deserve a two-star rating for the RESEARCHER?

Wow.

Looks like either the assignment of A=1, B=2, or the input number
15284476 might be wrong, as well.

Using the A=1 assignment pattern, you can place letters into the
puzzle more easily if you start from the back - the last number is 6 -
that's F.  (Since 76 isn't a letter).

Second to last number is 7 is G.  (47 isn't a letter, either.)

Third to last letter is D (44 isn't a letter)

Fourth to last letter is also D  (84 isn't a letter).

Fifth to last letter is H (28 isn't a letter)

Sixth to last letter is B (52 isn't a letter)

Seventh to last letter(s) is either E  (5) or O  (15)

If there's an eighth to last, it's A  (1)

By now, it looks unlikely that the number is correct - neither
"AEBHDDGF" or "OBHDDGF" are even close to a word.  However, as I said
above, it might be the A=1 assignment that's causing the trouble.

15 2 8 4 4 7 6

15 = s
2 = t
8 = i
4 = r
7 = u
6 = p

stirrup

LetterRip

methodology - first note that only the 1 and 5 can be broken up in an
alternative method, I chose to view them as 15 as an arbitrary first
guess.
Then noted the double letter.  Then noted that I'd need a couple of
vowels given the length of the word, and given the doubled letters
likely immediately before and/or after (as a first guess...).  Then
substituted in common consonants for the first two letters.  which led
rapidly to stirrup.