On Pruning Trees for Pangrams

Authors

Leonard Gordon

Abstract

In the February and May issues of Word Ways, Lee Sallows describes how he constructed a pangram machine (a special-purpose digital computer) to discover self-referential sentences of the form "This sentence contains five a's, two b's, ... and one z", after he realized that the program he had written for a general-purpose digital computer would trake 31.7 million years to run. There's no doubt that building the pangram machine was a personally satisfying accomplishment -- although I am afraid that it became his Galatea.

Recommended Citation

Gordon, Leonard (1992) "On Pruning Trees for Pangrams," Word Ways: Vol. 25 : Iss. 3 , Article 8.
Retrieved from: https://digitalcommons.butler.edu/wordways/vol25/iss3/8