Obviously when you design the wheels you want to arrange the letters so that they can spell the largest number of words. Assuming there are 10 letters on a wheel, what are the best wheels?
That's the puzzle. The metapuzzle is to see if an equivalent puzzle has already been posed and answered.
![[Comments]](/nb//themes/Default/comments.png "2 comments")
(2) Thu Sep 13 2007 19:02 Puzzle:
At the office supply store we saw a padlock whose keying mechanism was a set of five wheels like you might see on a briefcase. Instead of numbers the wheels had letters on them. Instead of a random string, you can choose a word to be the lock combination. The word can have five letters or four (one of the 'letters' on the fifth wheel was a blank). The locks in the store were set to "MATCH".
- Comments:
Posted by dbt at Wed Sep 19 2007 14:59
Hmm. One thing that you don't specify is whether wheels 1-4 should be identical. This would save money in manufacturing but greatly reduce the number of available words.(presumably if you went this way wheel 5 would be a strict subset as well.)
Posted by Leonard at Wed Sep 19 2007 15:03
All the wheels can be different.
