Name Association Challenge

[Tripredacus]

I tried something when I was bored the other day... well technically I don't get bored but whatever. On a private forum, I decided to do a Name Association challenge on my own. It is a game I play with friends often and I wanted to see how far I could get. The basics are I started with a name, then change 1 word to change it to another name. There was a catch, all the names had to be actual people you could look up, and all the names I had to think of without looking them up. (I did look up some to confirm spelling.) I kept track of them in a list so that I would not have any duplicates.

Now that I had this list, I thought maybe there could be another use for it now that the challenge was done. I thought maybe some programmer would want to challenge themself in creating a script or program that could duplicate the order (or even make other order possibilities) based on the list. So that is what I'm leaving here. I may post this on other forums later but wanted MSFN coders to have the first opportunity.

The basic rules of the challenge:

- change one word to another word.

- initials count as a word.

There was 1 error that I know of. It concerns a typo that I left in the list uncorrected where I used the wrong spelling of a name. That is "Tyrone Gardner" but the person's name is actually Tyrone Garner. I'm fairly certain that changing it in the list would cause the challenge impossible to finish. The list itself is not in the order in which they were entered. They are in alphebetical order for my purposes of making sure I used no duplicates.

Here is the list:

http://pastebin.com/MkKfyvJ4

I can say that the first name was John L. Williams and the last name was Anton Volchenkov.

[bphlpt]

I'm fairly certain that changing it in the list would cause the challenge impossible to finish.

"Impossible to finish" meaning impossible to come up with a progression starting with John L. Williams and ending with Anton Volchenkov and using all the names in your list? In your original Name Association challenge, how did you know when you were finished? When everyone got bored with it, ran out of names (impossible), or what? Sorry, but I'm a little bit confused.

Cheers and Regards

[Tripredacus]

I'm fairly certain that changing it in the list would cause the challenge impossible to finish.

"Impossible to finish" meaning impossible to come up with a progression starting with John L. Williams and ending with Anton Volchenkov and using all the names in your list? In your original Name Association challenge, how did you know when you were finished? When everyone got bored with it, ran out of names (impossible), or what? Sorry, but I'm a little bit confused.

Cheers and Regards

It wasn't anyone else but me. I knew I was "finished" because I couldn't think of any way to continue past Anton Volchenkov. And yes... I used all the names on that list and only once.

But, I did it all by myself (other people's additions were not recorded) and it took over 4 hours all in one day. So it is technically possible to be able to continue past Anton Volchenkov but even to this point I hadn't come up with what could be next... since I finished this a day and a half ago.

The impossibility is presumed, only because of the way Tyrone Gardner was accomplished. While the names I picked were not random (obviously) I did think a few "moves" ahead so not to box myself into a corner. But sometimes I wasn't paying so much attention. Which is why you will find a band name in there (that isn't actually a person) as one of the few "cheats" I had to use to continue. After that, I had gone from Tony Toni Tone (the band name) to Toni Braxton, Tyrone Braxton, Tyrone Gardner to Paul Gardner. Paul Gardner (at least for me) is a better name to settle on as it has more common pieces in it. If I had actually used Tyrone Garner (the correct spelling) then I might just have been stuck.

I did notice my own trends while doing this, as sometimes I could go on for many names, coming up with them within seconds... but then others caused my brain to go blank... until I thought of something 20 minutes later! It was an interesting experience.