NEILB's Blog

In the 14th Perl Weekly Challenge, the second part was to create the longest word out of US state postal codes. The challenge was attributed to me, but it's not quite what I intended. So here's an additional challenge — the one I intended. Think of it as challenge 2a: what's the longest word you can spell by traversing US states, taking the initial or initials of the states as you pass through them, without revisiting any states?

For example, starting in Wisconsin, if you travel to Iowa, then Nebraska, and finally Kansas, you spell out wink:

Note that North Dakota is "nd" and not "n", and similarly for South Carolina, New Mexico, etc.

I found a file with state adjacency information, and created a JSON file that's easy to load.

Reading tweets from The Perl Conference, someone mentioned a state, and I needed to look at a map to remind myself where it is. And looking at a map, I wondered ...