Chemical Words List

An anonymous reader writes "Mark Nandor, a teacher of mathematics at The Wellington School, has recently posted a new chemical words page. For those who haven't seen this before, it is a list of English words that can be spelled using chemical symbols."

Comments

Nifty.

[millennial]

My friends and I did something like this in our college chem class. We came up with things like C3Po (or C3PO). Needless to say, acronyms can be a bit easier than actual words.

Valid molecules?

[allanc]

I want to know how many of these words' constituent chemicals could actually combine into a valid molecule.

Phonic Frugalities

[digitaldc]

What pointless waste, pure foolishness of syntactic tabulations.

(Note: these are just words found and rearranged to form a sentence)

The wooden periodic table

[cyclone96]

Theodore Gray has put together a surprisingly interesting site based on his wooden periodic table of the elements (that actually contains samples of the elements - except the ones that would kill the builder and maybe a few of the neighbors).

On the site he has a mathematica based app (he works at Wolfram) which will take a string of characters and attempt to construct it from element sybols.

One Line (Though a long one)

[jefu]

egrep -i "^((ac)|(ag)|(al)|(am)|(ar)|(as)|(at)|(au)|(b)|(ba )|(be)|(bh)|(bi)|(bk)|(br)|(c)|(ca)|(cd)|(ce)|(cf) |(cl)|(cm)|(co)|(cr)|(cs)|(cu)|(db)|(ds)|(dy)|(er) |(es)|(eu)|(f)|(fe)|(fm)|(fr)|(ga)|(gd)|(ge)|(h)|( he)|(hf)|(hg)|(ho)|(hs)|(i)|(in)|(ir)|(k)|(kr)|(la )|(li)|(lr)|(lu)|(md)|(mg)|(mn)|(mo)|(mt)|(n)|(na) |(nb)|(nd)|(ne)|(ni)|(no)|(np)|(o)|(os)|(p)|(pa)|( pb)|(pd)|(pm)|(po)|(pr)|(pt)|(pu)|(ra)|(rb)|(re)|( rf)|(rg)|(rh)|(rn)|(ru)|(s)|(sb)|(sc)|(se)|(sg)|(s i)|(sm)|(sn)|(sr)|(ta)|(tb)|(tc)|(te)|(th)|(ti)|(t l)|(tm)|(u)|(uub)|(uuh)|(uup)|(uuq)|(uut)|(v)|(w)| (xe)|(y)|(yb)|(zn)|(zr))+$" your-favorite-word-list

Though I'll admit I used a one line python program to construct the regular expression from a file listing the chemical element symbols.

Re:One Line (Though a long one)

[belmolis]

I ran this regular expression, using egrep, against the ENABLE wordlist. It took approximately ONE SECOND on a 1.6GHz P4 with 512MB RAM, not exactly a supercomputer. Mathematica is a great tool for some purposes, but not for this.

Re:One Line (Though a long one)

[belmolis]

I just compared my results, using egrep, with Nandor's. He failed to find two valid words "berg" and "urges", but found three non-words, "cryosurg ical", "urg es", and "v irgins". The correct count is therefore 26,811.

Howdy, kids.

[nandorman]

'Sup, y'all?

Yes, it is a waste of time.

Yes, I'm sure there are better/faster ways to generate the list of words - the reason I used Mathematica is that I was finding the 2x2, 3x3, 4x4, 5x5, ..., 11x11 word squares and magic word squares. Just checking every matrix using all of the possible 7-symbol chemical words would mean that you're looking at evaluating 7685305573422409190000000 matrices to determine if each is a valid square - I don't think there's a one-line code that would work and take less time than a few billion universe-ages. Using Mathematica to set up some shortcuts in evaluating those is pretty easy, though. Since I was in Mathematica already, and knew I had some restrictions (like using only words with distinct chemical symbols), why use something else? Besides, my job is not in the technology industry at all, so I only know 6-7 programming languages - and not any of the new ones. And it's not like I spent my life doing this, it was background while I did my actual teaching job. So if it took a long time, what do I care?

No, I'm not a professor (not sure how that one got started). I have a Ph.D. in physics from Ohio State, so the parents and administration at Wellington make me call myself "Dr. Nandor"; otherwise, I'd just as soon go by "Mr. Nandor." Besides, the kids like calling me "Doc."

No, I didn't even think to censor the list. Oops. Since it's on a school website, I'll have to *** some things out.

No, I'm not sure how "berg" didn't make it onto the list, and I'll have to add it. I only found Rg words at the end of my "work," since I didn't know element 111 had actually been officially named, so I must have copied/pasted it in incorrectly into code I was using.

Hope y'all enjoyed it for the random "entertainment" it was meant to be. My brother submitted the story, so.... thanks?

Nandor

let's reproduce Belmolis's results.

[3-State Bit]

Here's a challenge, gentle readers!

From the article:

As a last note, it took me about 2800 computing hours on three computers to come up with all of this (parsed among three computers), not to mention the hours it took to program everything correctly. (The words on their own only took about 25ish hours, including programming - the longest parts were running the 4x4, 5x5, and 6x6 word square searches.

Reader jefu has produced (but not yet disclosed) a one-liner that gives the correct word-list in one second! Let's try to reproduce his results![1]

                        Slashdot Reader CONTEST
As an exercise to the slashdot reader, let's reproduce jefu's results, only this time noting total programming time as well. If you're interested, type:
$ echo 'started programming!'; date
at your bash prompt now! Ladies and gentleman, start your engines! Remember: post only your total programming time, and total execution time, not the actual one-liner you produce. (Don't ruin it for other readers.) May the power of script be with you!

[1] jefu, please refrain from disclosing your one-liner for generating the e-grep line above until the completion of the contest

Re:let's reproduce Belmolis's results.

[belmolis]

My total time to find a list of the elements and create the regexp, which I actually did prior to reading OP's comment, plus finding and downloading a copy of the ENABLE list, was about ten minutes. For anyone with much experience using regular expressions constructing the regexp is pretty trivial. Even typing it all in manually while looking at a list of the elements can be done in a few minutes. So, sure, it isn't 25 hours vs. one second, but it is something like 25 hours vs. 10 minutes.

Pop Quiz for Chem Geeks or Biologists

[PGillingwater]

OK, let's see how many of you really understand BioChemistry. Pop quiz time: which METAL occurs most commonly in mammals?

Don't google it -- just put down your best answer, and we'll see what firms up.