An actor and a profession

It's Sunday, Puzzlers, and you know that that means---it's time to solve this week's Sunday Puzzle from NPR:

This week's challenge comes from listener Peter Collins, of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Think of a famous movie star -- first and last names, nine letters in all. The third, fourth, fifth, seventh, and eighth letters, in order, name a profession. The star's last name is something that this profession uses. Who is the movie star and what is the profession?

Classic, easy-peasy transformation puzzle, right? We take thing from Class A, apply the prescribed transformation, and return thing from Class B. Quite similar to last week's puzzle, really. So what do we need to solve this one?

• Actors:
• We need a list of actors; fortunately this is a common element in puzzles, so we can use this list of actors from previous puzzles.
• Professions:
• Ideally, we'd check to see if the specified transformation gives us a string that's found in a list of professions. I think this is going to be overkill, however. I suspect that if we simply check to see if the resulting string is a real word, that will reduce the number of candidates down to a number that we can quickly scan visually in order to find the solution. In fact, this may give us the solution only and no other candidates. So, we need:
• a lexicon; we can use the same 10K lexicon we've been using recently.
• transformation:
• I'll be using python to implement the transformation where we extract the five letters from the specified positions

Does this approach make sense to you? Would you go a step further and use some semantic tools like LMs  or embeddings to compare the transformed strings against a list of professions? Do you think this approach is adequate?

I think my approach is working. If you'd like to explore it, I'm sharing my python script as usual on GitHub. I'll be back after NPR's Thursday deadline to share my solution. Good luck!

-- (Puzzle Dr.) Levi King

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