Saying a number in the shortest way
4

This is cheeky and a cheat. I wrote this script about a year ago based off of this comic (tad of profanity).

The idea goes like this. Given any number as a string, adding the number of characters will eventually condense to 4. Four itself is 4 letters long and thus the end of the line.

For example:


10 -> 'ten'
'ten' -> 3 (letters long)
3 -> 'three'
'three' -> 5 (letters long)
5 -> 'five'
'five' -> 4 (letters long)


I verified up to 100,000. Very hacky but got the job done:

to20 = [
        'zero'
        ,'one'
        ,'two'
        ,'three'
        ,'four'
        ,'five'
        ,'six'
        ,'seven'
        ,'eight'
        ,'nine'
        ,'ten'
        ,'eleven'
        ,'twelve'
        ,'thirteen'
        ,'fourteen'
        ,'fifteen'
        ,'sixteen'
        ,'seventeen'
        ,'eighteen'
        ,'nineteen'
        ]

by10s = ['twenty'
         ,'thirty'
         ,'forty'
         ,'fifty'
         ,'sixty'
         ,'seventy'
         ,'eighty'
         ,'ninety'
         ]

by10powers = [
             'hundred'
             ,'thousand'
             ]

def cosmetize(number):

    # the number is too damn high!
    if number &gt;= 100000:
        return "Too high"

    numstr = str(number)

    # Do ones
    if number &lt; 10:
        return to20[number]

    # Pshh.. who needs zero anymore?
    to20[0] = ''

    # Do tens
    numstr10 = numstr[-2:]
    if int(numstr10) &lt; 20:
        numstr10 = to20[int(numstr10)]
    else:
        numstr10 = by10s[int(numstr10[0])-2] + to20[int(numstr10[1])]
    if number &lt; 100:
        return numstr10

    # Do hundreds
    numstr100 = numstr[-3]
    if numstr10 == '':
        numstr10 = "" 
        numstr100 = to20[int(numstr100)] + by10powers[0]
    elif int(numstr[-2:]) &gt; 19:
        numstr100 = to20[int(numstr100)] + by10powers[0]
        numstr100 += 'and'
    else:
        numstr100 = 'and'
    if number &lt; 1000:
        return numstr100 + numstr10

    # Do thousands
    numstr1000 = numstr[:-3]
    if numstr100 == 'hundred':
        numstr100 = ""
    if int(numstr1000) &lt; 20:
        numstr1000 = to20[int(numstr1000)] + by10powers[1]
    else:
        numstr1000 = by10s[int(numstr1000[0])-2] + by10powers[1]

    return numstr1000 + numstr100 + numstr10


i = 0
mx = []
z = 0
while i &lt; 100000:
    length = cosmetize(i)
    x = [length]
    while not len(length) == 4:
        length = cosmetize(len(length))
    i += 1

# No inifinite loop? what magic is this?
print "OMG"