Most of you are old enough to remember how incredibly primitive texting on the first mobile phones was. Hell, some of you are probably still using these keyboards today. For those of you who don't see what I'm talking about, here's how it used to work.
Leaving punctuation aside, a keyboard would use 8 keys (from 2 to 9) to type the letters of the alphabet. Each letter would be assigned to a key, in a sorted alphabetical order, like this:
Exercise
What's the most annoying word of the english language to type on these keyboard? Annoying in that case would be the word with the highest number of consecutive letters belonging to the same key.
Bonus questions
Try to play a bit with the definition of "most annoying". What's more annoying, a word with 5 consecutive letters on the same key or a word with 3 consecutive letters on the same key twice?
What's the longest "not annoying" (0 consecutive letters on the same key) word?
Where to get a dictionary?
You will need a list of all the english words for this exercise. You can easily snatch one off the web. If you don't feel like searching:
Leaving punctuation aside, a keyboard would use 8 keys (from 2 to 9) to type the letters of the alphabet. Each letter would be assigned to a key, in a sorted alphabetical order, like this:
| key | letter |
|-----+---------|
| 2 | a b c |
| 3 | d e f |
| 4 | g h i |
| 5 | j k l |
| 6 | m n o |
| 7 | p q r s |
| 8 | t u v |
| 9 | w x y z |
|-----+---------|
For example, in order to type the letter "o", one would need to press the key "6" twice. In order to type successive letters on the same key, one would need to enter the first letter, wait a bit, then enter the second letter. That would slow our typing considerably and generally annoy us a lot.Exercise
What's the most annoying word of the english language to type on these keyboard? Annoying in that case would be the word with the highest number of consecutive letters belonging to the same key.
Bonus questions
Try to play a bit with the definition of "most annoying". What's more annoying, a word with 5 consecutive letters on the same key or a word with 3 consecutive letters on the same key twice?
What's the longest "not annoying" (0 consecutive letters on the same key) word?
Where to get a dictionary?
You will need a list of all the english words for this exercise. You can easily snatch one off the web. If you don't feel like searching:
- You can use the dict used by OpenOffice for spell checking
- If you're on a Unix system, there's a dictionary somewhere on your system. Most probably under /usr/share. For example on MacOSX you can find it in /usr/share/dict/words.