Welcome back, Puzzlers. Spoiler warning: The puzzle solution is posted at the end of this page.
Ready to solve the latest Sunday Puzzle from NPR?
This week's challenge comes from listener Sandy Weisz, of Chicago. Name a famous woman in American history with a three-part name. Change one letter in her first name to a double letter. The resulting first and second parts of her name form the first and last names of a famous athlete. And the last part of the woman's name is a major rival of that athlete. Who are these people?
If you're still working this puzzle, you may want to check my preview post where I discussed the puzzle in more depth.
We determined that we need these things:
- W: a list of women from American history; each must have a name that can be represented in three parts;
- I came up with a pretty short list, so I just included it directly in my solver script;
- A: a list of famous athletes;
- fx_double_letter: a function to iterate through the letters in each first name and double OR replace AND double, returning a list of the resulting "names";
So from there, it's pretty straightforward. We iterate through each woman in W, apply fx_double_letter, check each resulting first and second name against list A; when we find a match, we also need to check the third name for a match in list A. Because I'm only using one list of athletes, I'll need to confirm the "rival" part of the puzzle to be true.
And that's how I solved it. If you want to try my solver script, you can download it from the companion GitHub repo for this blog, as always.
As I discussed in the preview, the wording of this puzzle was a little bit tricky.
The double letter is a different letter; you have to replace the letter and then double it.
Here's my solution, below:
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Lady Bird Johnson --> Larry Bird, (Earvin 'Magic') Johnson
Did you get the same solution?
See you next week!
--Levi King
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