Hi Puzzlers, have you solved this week's Sunday Puzzle from NPR yet?
This week's challenge comes from listener Lillian Range, of New Orleans. The word NONUNION has four N's and no other consonant. What famous American of the past -- first and last names, 8 letters in all -- has four instances of the same consonant and no other consonant?
Clearly, this one is going to be light on the NLP side of things. All we really need here is a long enough list of famous Americans and a few python functions to iterate through them.
I've scraped together a list of 10,000 famous names, which has proven adequate. [A caveat--my list is noisy, has been cleaned with some automated functions which ASCII-fy everything, so diacritics are removed, spellings may get broken, etc. And on top of that, there are lots of non-American names and I even noticed some fictional characters. This is a bootstrapped list and I wouldn't necessarily rely on it for future puzzles.]
I also wrote a little python script to read in each name, keep only those that are 8 letters total, and finally print out any names that have only 1 consonant with exactly 4 instances (in data science terms-- 1 type, 4 tokens). I've got it printing out the correct name now. Feel free to download the script and list and try it yourself.
Or now that the Thursday deadline has passed, you can see my solution below:
See you at the next puzzle!
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