Words, Just Words (words2)

155 teams scored 8800 points on this task, for a maximum score of 100, an average score of 57 and a median score of 60.

Highlights

  1. Carlo Zuccante, Venezia is the institute with the most points (360).
  2. Lombardia is the region with the most points (2040).

Statement

William loves words and likes to collect them in "special" dictionaries. Today, he's building a dictionary that contains all the words. Or actually: all the words that can be formed with the 26 English letters. The size of this dictionary is, naturally, infinite. This means that it wouldn't be practical to generate the dictionary to, say, a text file on disk, since it would require an infinite amount of space. However, William would still like to be able to identify the location in the dictionary of a given word. The ordering rule in this special dictionary is a bit unusual: we consider shorter words to always come before longer ones. For example, the word "xy" comes before "abc", simply because it is shorter. If two words have the same length, they are ordered in the traditional (lexicographic) way, so "xyz" > "abc". This means that the first 26 words in the dictionary are formed by only one character: "a", "b", …, "z". The next words are formed by only two characters, and so on...