Question

I'm on PS6 Problem 4. I'm having trouble understanding exactly what they are asking for and the pseudo code they have provided. In particular the this part:
Let d = {}
For every word w in the word list:
Let d[(string containing the letters of w in sorted order)] = w .
What exactly do they mean by sorted order?

Answer 1

@pelikan what class are you taking? I'm taking MIT 6_00SC and I don't see anything about the problem you describe in PS6 Problem 4. In mine, PS6 is all about programming robots.

Answer 2

6.00 Intro to Computer Science. It's about a word game

Answer 3

Let d = {}
For every word w in the word list:
Let d[(string containing the letters of w in sorted order)] = w

They say this part should be a preprocessing step ... so at the start of the program before you do anything else.

Lets assume you have a word list containing the following words:
python
is
pretty
powerful

first you would
Let d = {}

so it's empty

Then for the first word, which is python
Let d[(string containing the letters of w in sorted order)] = w
or
Let d['hnopty'] = 'python'
because (string containing the letters of w in sorted order) = 'hnopty'

Then repeat for the rest of the words (because it said for every word in the word list)

so you end up with
d['hnopty'] = 'python'
d['is'] = 'is'
d['erptty'] = 'pretty'
d['elfopuwr'] = 'powerful'

Answer 4

thanks. I wasn't sure if they meant sorting the words according to the value of each letter or if they just meant alphabetically. Thanks for the clarification!