{"id":88,"date":"2005-09-21T07:03:31","date_gmt":"2005-09-20T21:03:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/?p=88"},"modified":"2007-12-30T21:19:24","modified_gmt":"2007-12-30T11:19:24","slug":"name-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2005\/09\/21\/name-game\/","title":{"rendered":"Name Game"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><!-- UnMarkedDown_2_01132526432--><\/p>\n<p>Here\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s why I have been looking at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2005\/09\/20\/julian-is-the-new-black\/\">popularity of names<\/a>. Yesterday, I woke up with this puzzle in my head, after an odd dream.<\/p>\n<h3>A Strange New Job<\/h3>\n<p>The scenario is that you work in the mailroom of a large company. Internal mail is addressed with a typed label with the employee&#8217;s first name only in capital letters. It&#8217;s okay &#8211; it is not ambiguous because the company has very odd HR policies that ensure that no-one is hired if they have the same first name as someone else who already works there. They do not permit diminutives (e.g. TOM, DICK or HARRY) They also insist that everyone has a relatively common name.<\/p>\n<h3>Definition of Common Names<\/h3>\n<p>What does common mean?  I think 1 in 10,000 names for that gender is about right. (That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s really 1 in 20,000 population).  That corresponds to the 842<sup>nd<\/sup> most common boy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name, and the 1000-and-something<sup>th<\/sup> girl\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name. I am willing to settle on the top 1000 boys\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 names and girls\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 names if it makes it easier. I can negotiate.<\/p>\n<p>Choose a list appropriate for your region, culture and period. The <a href=\"http:\/\/www.ssa.gov\/OACT\/babynames\/\">USA Social Security database of baby names<\/a> is helpful, but not perfect because it doesn&#8217;t give overall population data, only by year of birth.) <\/p>\n<h3>Typos<\/h3>\n<p>People sometimes make typos on the address label. The errors are limited to a few categories:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>deletion of a single letter: e.g. JULIAN becomes JLIAN<\/li>\n<li>addition of a single letter: e.g. JULIAN becomes JKULIAN<\/li>\n<li>substitution of a single letter for another: e.g. JULIAN becomes JKLIAN<\/li>\n<li>transposition of two letters: e.g. JULIAN becomes JNLIAU<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Strangely, people only ever make at most <em>one<\/em> of these errors per label.<\/p>\n<h3>Impact of Typos<\/h3>\n<p>If the typo doesn&#8217;t cause the name to become ambiguous, you should be able to work it out and deliver anyway: JNLIAU should be successfully delivered to JULIAN.<\/p>\n<p>If a typo turns one name into another, the letter will, of course, be delivered wrongly. e.g. Deletion of the letter N would turn JULIAN into JULIA.<\/p>\n<p>The interesting part is when the typo makes it impossible to resolve the name: Does DAREN resolve to DARREN or KAREN?<\/p>\n<h3>The Puzzle<\/h3>\n<p>The puzzle is to come up with an example of the most ambiguous single typo of a name.<\/p>\n<p>I haven\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t been able to come up with any inspiring answers to this puzzle. The best I have come up with is actually based on my own name: JULIN maps to JULIA, JULIE, JULIAN and JULIEN.<\/p>\n<h3>The Meta-Puzzle<\/h3>\n<p>If you know <a href=\u00e2\u20ac\u009d http:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/2005\/05\/21\/puzzling-over-puzzles\/\u00e2\u20ac\u009d> my attitude to these sorts of puzzles<\/a>, you will have already guessed that there is a meta-puzzle here: Given a database of names, come up with an efficient algorithm to solve the original puzzle. Bonus points for the first actual software implementation!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The scenario is that you work in the mailroom of a large company, with very odd HR policies. The puzzle is to resolve the mistyped address labels.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_s2mail":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33,27],"tags":[213,212,55],"class_list":["post-88","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-puzzle-solving","category-thoughts-from-the-shower","tag-algorithm","tag-dream","tag-puzzle"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.somethinkodd.com\/oddthinking\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}