[ajug-members] Geek Challenge

[Dan Glauser]

Are there any computer scientists in the house? 
Mathematicians?  Hard core geeks?  I know you are out
there.....

I'm looking to discover, devise, or some how come up
with an algorithm to find ideal full decomposition of
a non delimited string into words.  Some simple
examples:

ariverrunsthroughit   =>  a river runs through it

cookinguniversity  =>  cooking university

p1ecesofpie    =?  ?????? of pie =>  no match

8675rarara   =?  ???? ra ra ra  => no match, must
completely break down the string into words

Some more interesting examples:

booksugar  =>  book sugar
This is interesting because we don't want to make the
mistake of:

booksugar =?  books ????  =>  no match

This is a common issue with the algorithms I've been
trying so far.

goodstart  =?  good start || goods tart
Which is it?
Please note for the problem I am trying to solve it is
more important to get the total number of words that
fully fit the string so in this case it doesn't as
much matter which strings are picked as long as the
ones picked cover the entire string.

Make sense?

There are tons of more difficult examples that I've
been feeding into different algorithms, I hesitate to
cloud the AJUG list with them.  If you like this type
of challenge and/or are good with computer
science/math then I would appreciate taking the
discussion offline hearing your input.  Once a
solution is found I'd be happy to post the results to
the list.  This probably mirrors a classic CS problem
used to solve xxxx, I'm just not seeing it and would
like another set of eyes and someone to discuss
different approaches with.

If your help leads to a solution then I see a free
dinner in your future......

Come on, algorithms are fun!

:)

--
Dan
danglauser at yahoo.com