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The Ultimate Answer

Week 42

According to the Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, the answer to life, the universe and everything is...42!

For this challenge, we are implementing the scoring system for a word game where users score points based on the sum of the difference between consecutive letters of a word

Note that the order of letters doesn't matter - i.e. the score of "ab" or "ba" would both be 1, since the difference (in ASCII value) between each of those letters is 1. In order words, scores should always be positive

Let's look at another example:

"hello" would be scored as follows: 'h' -> 'e' = 3 'e' -> 'l' = 7 'l' -> 'l' = 0 'l' -> 'o' = 3 The word "hello" would hence score 13 "bye" in contrast would score 43: 'b' -> 'y' = 23 'y' -> 'e' = 20

Your goal is two-fold:

• To find all words with a score of 42
• To find the highest scoring word (note: there is only 1, so you don't have to worry about multiple words having the same joint high score)

For example, suppose we used the word list:

apple dry epidemic faucet night opera pause repel silence zulus

Then our expected output (including the sentences on the first and last lines) would be:

The answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything is... epidemic opera repel silence The highest scoring word is faucet which scores 60 points

As we can see, 4 words ("epidemic", "opera", "repel" and "silence") scored 42 points, while "faucet" was the highest scoring word in this list

For the real program, you should use this full word list

Submit Answer

Hints

Hints will be released at the start of each of the following days - e.g. the start of day 3 is 48 hours after the challenge starts

Release Day	Hint
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