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Sunday Times Teaser 2833 – Celebrity Dogs

by Graham Smithers

Published: 8 January 2017 (link)

Six celebrities appeared on television with their dogs. Each celebrity brought two dogs and between them they had twelve different breeds.

The celebrities were Clooney, Hathaway, Jackman, Palermo, Rossum and Seyfried. The breeds of dog were Akita, Basenji, Basset, Bull Terrier, Chihuahua, Dalmation, Foxhound, Keeshond, Plott, Poodle, Rottweiler and Setter.

For the name and breeds in each trio of celebrity plus their two dogs, if you look at any two out of the three then there are just two letters of the alphabet that occur (once or more) in both.

In alphabetical order of the breeds, please list the initials of the owners (e.g. C, S, A, C, …)

2 Comments Leave one →
  1. Brian Gladman permalink

    The spelling of Dalmatian was wrong in the original but I have used the correct spelling here, which does not change the result.

  2. We can still use the grouping.py module (given at Teaser 2831 [ https://brg.me.uk/?page_id=4218#comment-730 ]), but it’s use is slightly complicated by not knowing what the two collections of dogs are.

    Here I divide the dogs into all possible collections, and then use a selection function that requires the two dogs in any group to appear in order. This gives us the solution with a program that runs in 298ms, so it’s not too shabby. A custom program would improve on this, but I’m not sure it’s worth the bother.

    I also use the partitions() function from the enigma.py library [ https://www.magwag.plus.com/jim/enigma.html ] to construct the possible collections of 6 dogs from the list of 12.

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