gistfile1.txt

ENGINEERING PROBLEM #2:
Our marketing department has just negotiated a deal with several of the top local 
merchants that will allow us to offer exclusive discounts on various products to our top 
customers every day.  The catch is that we may only offer each product to one customer 
and we may only make one offer to each customer. 
Each day we will get the list of products that are eligible for these special discounts.  We 
then have to decide which products to offer to which customers.  Fortunately our team 
of highly trained statisticians has developed an amazing mathematical model for 
determining which customers are most likely to buy which products.   
With all of the hard work done for us, all we have to do now is implement a program 
that assigns each product to a given customer while maximizing the total suitability of all 
products to all customers.  We are going to be busy writing up the patent application for 
this amazing new technology, so we need you to implement the matching program.  
The top-secret algorithm is: 
• If the length of the product name is even, the base suitability score (SS) is the number 
of vowels in the customer’s name multiplied by 1.5. 
• If the length of the product name is odd, the base SS is the number of consonants in 
the customer’s name multiplied by 1. 
• If the length of the product name shares any common factors (besides 1) with the 
length of the customer’s name, the SS is increased by 50% above the base SS. 
Write a program that assigns products to sites in a way that maximizes the total SS over 
the set of customers.  Each customer can only have one product and each product can 
only be offered to one customer. Your program should run on the command line and 
take as input two newline separated files, the first containing the names of the products 
and the second containing the names of the customers.  The output should be the total 
SS and a matching between customers and products.  You do not need to worry about 
malformed input, but you should certainly handle both upper and lower case names.  
Use any language you like as long as it isn’t VB. 
For extra credit, submit a solution in both an imperative language and a functional one, 
using language-specific features (feel free to submit a declarative solution as well, if 
that’s your thing).