Is this a major lacuna in my education, or are others just as confused as I am? To find out, I have created an alphabetization test. I collected the following ten entries from my phone book, presented here in random order. Every entry appears exactly as it did in the phone book, including all spaces and punctuation (or lack thereof). Your assignment, should you choose to take it: place them in the order they appeared in the phone book, first to last.
A & O Liquor StoreI'm offering a prize (as yet unselected, value less than $20) for the first person to give me the correct answer, in the comments or by email. Limit: 3 entries per person, one at a time. You can even cheat by using the phone book (but I won't tell you which one I used). I'll reveal the correct answer if I haven't heard it in one week.
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A & A Automotive
A Two Girl Experience
A & F Auto Supply
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
Incidentally, I have developed a hypothesis about the alphabetization scheme, but I won't let on just yet. I'll post an update or comment later.
UPDATE: D'oh. The final entry in the list should be A & A Auto Performance Inc., not A & Auto Peformance Inc. I've corrected it now. But even ignoring that entry, all of people's guesses thus far have been incorrect.
26 comments:
I have no idea, but "A Two Girl Experience" sounds like a number worth calling.
This is how I would have alphabetized them:
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
Out of curiosity, I looked up the number for "A Two Girl Experience" and called it. I'm sorry to report the experience wasn't anything more than curious. Curious because after dialing the number, I heard a voice recording telling me I had reached a completely different number! I double-checked the number and redialed with the same results each time. These people must have more business than they know what to do with because you're only told the number you supposedly dialed and "thank you," but never given the opportunity to leave a message. Maybe it's their way of teasing their clients... not that I know anything about them.
The usual order would be Space > Symbol > Number > Letter.
Which is exactly how kissmesoftly wrote it out.
Kissmesoftly -- wrong! Try again!
Joel -- sounds like a reasonable convention, but (given that kissmesoftly's answer was wrong) apparently not the convention used by the phone book.
In my phone book, space sorts before any printing character, ampersand (and its surrounding spaces) is a null, and numbers are treated as if spelled out.
I get
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
The harder alphabetization test I saw once was for books in a library, and it included Victor Hugo's novel 1793, which had to be sorted by the french colloquial spelling of the year 1793. (We don't say "one thousand seven hundred ninety three" when pronouncing year names, and neither do they.)
Chris -- wrong, but that's the closest anyone's come so far.
In addition to the comments, I've gotten four incorrect guesses by email.
How about:
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
That was Chris's answer but sorted first word with first word, sencond with second... instead of threating spaces as just another character.
or with numbers before letters:
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
I would have gotten something similar to 'kissmesoftly' except the placement of A Auto Emergency and A & Auto Performance. Databases I've seen in access, if i remember correctly, seem to sort the order this way as someone mentioned earlier: Symbols (&)>numbers>letters>words.
But you said kissmesoftly is wrong and chris is close. hmm...
A & A Automotive
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
A B C Haircuts
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
Glen, piece of cake. Since software obviously does their alphabetiztion, standardized numerical character assignments will govern the order. So, to solve your problem, I plugged the list into Excel and sorted it. Here it is:
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
OK, Glen my last comment was based on pure logic. Obviously, from looking at my local PB, some additional creative rules are in play:
Rule #1: Ignore the "&" symbol
Rule #2: Spell out any numbers
Rule #3: Put together repeated, single separated letters, like "A A" or A & A"
Given these rules, your list sorts to:
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A B C Haircuts
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
Unless "A 2 Z" is interpreted as "A to Z" vs. "A two Z", in which case I reverse the order of those two entries.
Given the update my answers would be:
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
AA Auto Body
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
Sorry, all answers given so far are wrong (even if I ignore the placement of A & A Auto Performanc Inc. because of the error in the original post).
If anyone wants to cheat, they can just throw the data into an SQL table and sort desc.
Assuming of course everyone is using the same collation. Do you know the name of the collation you are using? Usually Latin1_General Case Insensitive Accent Sensitive is the standard collation used in the US, but SQL supports 39 lingual collations and binary collation, for a total of 40 collations. That's not including the back-compatability collations. With Yukon (SQL2005) You might have more, but I don't have that info handy right now.
Let's have a go...
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
A 4 V Audio
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
Z suggested reading "A 2 Z" as "A to Z". I like that suggestion, but if it's true, then the phone company could have converted it to "A-Z", and my book treats the dash as a null like the ampersand. That gives
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience
AA Auto Body
A & A Automotive
A & Auto Performance Inc.
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
Still no correct guesses!
Spell out numbers. Ignore ampersand. Spaces sort before A.
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A & F Auto Supply
A 4 V Audio
A & O Liquor Store
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
AA Auto Body
AA Auto Body
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A B C Haircuts
A & F Auto Supply
A 4 V Audio
A & O Liquor Store
A Two Girl Experience
A 2 Z Construction Inc.
...Rule #4 Combine all free CAPS.
A Auto Emergency Lock Out
A 4 V Audio
A Two Girl Experience*
A 2 Z Construction Inc.*
AA Auto Body
A & A Auto Performance Inc.
A & A Automotive
A B C Haircuts
A & F Auto Supply
A & O Liquor Store
*may be inverted due to "to" vs "two" interpretation
Sorry, still no correct guesses!
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