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in reply to Re: Golf challange: match U.S. State names
in thread Golf challange: match U.S. State names

Now 108 
/^\w\w\z/&("MNCAKSCOHINMOKTNVALARIDCTX SDE GAZ ORIL IAKY"=~/$_/|
/(FL|M[ADEIST]|N[DEHNJY]|PA|[UV]T|W[AIVY])/)

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Another stoke off by adding a redundant check for Alaska, which allowed me to move Iowa and Kentucky out of the regexp and into the (more compact) string.

This suggests that there's a lesson in here about how a bit of redundancy in data can lead to more compact representations. I think we often hear problems like "match every state and nothing else" as "match every state exactly once, and nothing else."

In Section Meditations