{"id":502,"date":"2014-11-30T16:20:08","date_gmt":"2014-11-30T22:20:08","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/?p=502"},"modified":"2014-11-30T16:27:38","modified_gmt":"2014-11-30T22:27:38","slug":"roman-license-plates","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/2014\/11\/30\/roman-license-plates\/","title":{"rendered":"Roman License Plates"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Panchero's<\/a>

The Best License Plate?<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n

The singularity of this license plate was almost lost on me. I noticed it as I was pulling out of my parking space, and I thought: “Hey, ‘Civ 104’, like the 104th entry in the Civilization series! Boy, it’ll be a long time before they get to that one. Kind of like that other hypothetical Civ game, the one they’ll call ‘Civ CIV’, because it’ll be the one where the number of the game is ‘CIV’ in Roman numerals…”<\/p>\n

Then I started pulling back into that parking space (luckily it didn’t take me too long to think all that stuff), so I could get a picture. CIV 104! It’s that number! CIV! 104! Oh my gosh! Roman numerals!<\/p>\n

Since I saw this license plate a couple days ago, I’ve been wondering: How many license plates, in the Iowa style (3 letters, 3 numbers), have this property? And how could I answer that question with a minimum of effort? Yes. This is the kind of thing I do for fun.<\/p>\n

The brute-forcest way to do it would be to convert every decimal number from 001 to 999 into Roman numerals, and see which Roman numerals have three “digits”. That’s doing 1000 checks, though! A slightly less brutish method would be to convert every possible\u00a0three-digit\u00a0sequence of I, V, X, L, C, and D into decimals\u2014that would be only 216 checks.\u00a0Because M couldn’t appear in any of these license plates, right?<\/p>\n

Well, no. For example: CMI 901. And what about the sequence IM? Is IM a legal Roman numeral? That’d be\u00a0how you write 999, right?<\/p>\n

Well, no. 999 is\u00a0CMXCIX. I figured this out when I checked this big list of Roman numerals<\/a>. And then I had\u00a0yet another idea.<\/em><\/p>\n

I pasted that list into Inform, and then I wrote a quick little rule to pull out the 3-digit Roman numerals. The complete Inform 7 source for my project is here<\/a>,\u00a0but this is the important part:<\/p>\n

\"SOURCE\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This returns a list of 62 possible license plates, which without further ado I reproduce here:<\/p>\n

III 003\r\nVII 007\r\nXII 012\r\nXIV 014\r\nXVI 016\r\nXIX 019\r\nXXI 021\r\nXXV 025\r\nXXX 030\r\nXLI 041\r\nXLV 045\r\nLII 052\r\nLIV 054\r\nLVI 056\r\nLIX 059\r\nLXI 061\r\nLXV 065\r\nLXX 070\r\nXCI 091\r\nXCV 095\r\nCII 102\r\nCIV 104\r\nCVI 106\r\nCIX 109\r\nCXI 111\r\nCXV 115\r\nCXX 120\r\nCXL 140\r\nCLI 151\r\nCLV 155\r\nCLX 160\r\nCXC 190\r\nCCI 201\r\nCCV 205\r\nCCX 210\r\nCCL 250\r\nCCC 300\r\nCDI 401\r\nCDV 405\r\nCDX 410\r\nCDL 450\r\nDII 502\r\nDIV 504\r\nDVI 506\r\nDIX 509\r\nDXI 511\r\nDXV 515\r\nDXX 520\r\nDXL 540\r\nDLI 551\r\nDLV 555\r\nDLX 560\r\nDXC 590\r\nDCI 601\r\nDCV 605\r\nDCX 610\r\nDCL 650\r\nDCC 700\r\nCMI 901\r\nCMV 905\r\nCMX 910\r\nCML 950<\/pre>\n
If you don’t think the series III 003 – XCV 095 should count, because you hate initial zeroes, the number of license plates that meets your fascist standards is 41 instead.<\/p>\n
Thank you for your interest.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The singularity of this license plate was almost lost on me. I noticed it as I was pulling out of my parking space, and I thought: “Hey, ‘Civ 104’, like the 104th entry in the Civilization series! Boy, it’ll be a long time before they get to that one. Kind of like that other hypothetical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-502","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-prose"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":508,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502\/revisions\/508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rcveeder.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}