Dominion Strategy Forum
Dominion => Dominion General Discussion => Topic started by: ConMan on November 24, 2017, 01:27:21 am
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I've started looking for the minimal unique substrings in card names - in other words, what's the smallest set of consecutive letters that uniquely defines a card? I'm looking across all names of cards and card-shaped-things in the game (I'm debating whether to include both "Knights" and all the individual Knights, and I am counting split piles only as separate cards), ignoring punctuation (including spaces) and here are some of the interesting results so far (going alphabetically, I'm just finished the ones starting with "E", and where I give a substring it's the first one of that length in the card's name):
- Every letter of the alphabet is used in at least two names, so a single letter will never be sufficient to define a card.
- Several cards have minimum substrings of length 2 - for example, Bandit Ford (TF), Crypt (YP), Duke (UK), but 3 is usually the minumum.
- The longest minimum substring I've found so far is 5, which is Cursed Village (RSEDV), because it shares so much of its name with both Curse and Blessed Village.
- Of the 122 cards I've looked at, 9 cards have names that are completely contained in another card's name, and hence they have no unique substring.
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Man, I hope we don't have to start using these to refer to the cards.
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Do you have a plain-text list of all of the card names? I could write a Python script in about ten minutes that would give you those answers.
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Do you have a plain-text list of all of the card names? I could write a Python script in about ten minutes that would give you those answers.
Currently, no, it's all in an Excel spreadsheet. I could probably do it in R in about half an hour, too, I'm just enjoying the manual effort. I'll keep at it, and once I'm done I'll try to release it all in some kind of useful format.