#toyprogrammingchallenge

Okay, maybe you can help me come up with a problem. I can feel it coming on, so here is where I am going:

A trick for pricing things for negotiation is to hide the price encoded. One of the ways of doing this is using a 10 letter isogram such as "upholstery" to convert 0=u, 1=p, 2=h...9=y. So then you could mark a tag or sticker with Tly for $6.49 (with the capitols for dollars and the lower case for cents) Alternatively, you could have an asking price and hide a lowest taking price TlyLuu Meaning that you could ask 6.49 but settle for 4.00. This way someone else could negotiate with the customers, from the person that set the prices.

So writing a program should be unnecessary, the reason for using the isogram is to make it easy to remember and figure it out simply.

So how hard would a program to do this be? Ideas?

@Absinthe
Just spitballing here. Maybe a program to further obfuscate prices by generating sequences of isograms so buyers wouldn't be able to guess what letters mean over time, since different items would be hidden by different isograms and the encoded price has an additional signifier for which one it's encoded with? Then like a weird constraint like the first letter of each word used spells something out or something?

@serra that just begs for a rick roll :) I was thinking something more like encoding with one word, and then switch the letters around in the word and effect a 15, 20, 30% discount. Or something like that.

@Absinthe
hehe, I like that idea better

@serra not sure if it is possible, @freemo would know.. Might involve using different bases or something

@Absinthe
I'm not entirely sure I understand the original problem... An item would have a name then a encoded code and the encoded code along with the name can be used to decide some pricing info. Is that it? But what if the name has fewer than 10 letters. Since there isn't a letter for every number how is that handled?
@serra

@freemo @serra just a sticker with a sku#. Hey buddy how much for this thing? It should seem like you have all the prices memorized or made up on the spot :)

@Absinthe
Ok then I'm still confused how exactly you are encoding the information into the sku
@serra

@freemo @serra

what I was thinking was something like using the word "ABCDEFGHIJ" to encode a price BAjj as 10.00 if I were to change the word to "BCDEFGHIJA" then decoded the same price it would be $09.99.

I wonder if there is a system whereby encoding with one word, and decoding with another would be capable of effecting a change of some reasonable % like 10%, 15%, 35%.

I kind of thought you would have to change bases like base(*) or something, or if you had a pair of numbers that would be multiiplied or otherwise functionally modified. The problem being that you only have 10 numbers to play with.

I am not saying it is possible, but it seems like you could do it. I don't have a problem just trying to make one. Otherwise I don't have a real problem for this week yet. :)

@Absinthe

Would a single master word be selected as the key and then applied to all the products in the store. Or is the word unique to each item? Is the word just arbitrarily chosen?

Also is the word always exactly 10 letters long then?

@serra