Hey so for practice I found this coding challenge which I have now been working on for a few days. I have the first part, but I just can't seem to figure out how to continue from where I am. Here is the challenge:
Consider a "word" as any sequence of capital letters A-Z (not limited to
just "dictionary words"). For any word with at least two different letters,
there are other words composed of the same letters but in a different order (for
instance, STATIONARILY/ANTIROYALIST, which happen to both be dictionary words;
for our purposes "AAIILNORSTTY" is also a "word" composed of the same letters as
these two).
We can then assign a number to every word, based on where it falls in an
alphabetically sorted list of all words made up of the same set of letters. One
way to do this would be to generate the entire list of words and find the
desired one, but this would be slow if the word is long.
Write a program which takes a word as a command line argument and prints to
standard output its number. Do not use the method above of generating the entire
list. Your program should be able to accept any word 20 letters or less in
length (possibly with some letters repeated), and should use no more than 1 GB
of memory and take no more than 500 milliseconds to run. Any answer we check
will fit in a 64-bit integer.
Sample words, with their rank:
ABAB = 2
AAAB = 1
BAAA = 4
QUESTION = 24572
BOOKKEEPER = 10743
NONINTUITIVENESS = 8222334634
Your program will be judged on how fast it runs and how clearly the code is
written. We will be running your program as well as reading the source code, so
anything you can do to make this process easier would be appreciated.
So far, the code I have can return the correct answer if all of the letters are different. Here is my code:
import java.util.Arrays;
import java.util.Scanner;
public class AthenaDility {
public static void main (String[] args) {
//Finds word that is entered
Scanner scan = new Scanner (System.in);
String word = scan.next();
scan.close();
//added value
int value = 1;
//alphabetical representation
char[] charm = word.toCharArray();
char[] alphaCharm = word.toCharArray();
Arrays.sort(alphaCharm);
//Comparer
for (int m = 0; m < word.length(); m++) {
for (int c = 0; c < word.length()-1; c++) {
System.out.println(charm[m] + " " + alphaCharm[c]);
//Skips if alphaCharm is a space
if (alphaCharm[c] == '-') {
}
//If the same letter it breaks look and begins next
else if (charm[m] == alphaCharm[c]) {
System.out.println("Deleting: " + alphaCharm[c]);
alphaCharm[c] = '-'; //Delete letter for it is used and cannot be used to compare at later points
break;
}
//if the letter in alphaCharm comes before charm
else if (charm[m] > alphaCharm[c]){
System.out.println("Found!");
//factorial calculation
int factorial = 1;
//takes the length of the word minus the current location and one after for factorial
for (int f = word.length() - m - 1; f > 0; f--) {
System.out.print(f + " ");
factorial *= f;
}
//end loop
//Adding to others
System.out.println("\n" + "Factorial: " + factorial);
value += factorial;
}
else {
}
}
}
//Result
System.out.println("end: " + value);
}
}
To try and explain it as simply as I can, it creates two strings: one is the letters in alphabetical order and one is the original word. The program then compares each letter at a time and any letter that comes before the one in the original word alphabetically causes a factorial calculation for the number of combinations that would exist before the first word.
The part I need help factoring in is if the strings entered have more than one of the same letter. I have literally spent DAYS trying to figure this out. Thank you in advance!
p.s. the code has a lot of System.out.println for testing sake
