Your friend Pat has founded a new company, Abecedarian Inc., with a business model based on a strange loophole in the US intellectual patent law. Pat discovered that one could copyright substrings of the English language as long as those substrings were exactly four characters in length. Even more remarkable, they could ignore the presence of white space and capitalization in testing if a given substring is present in a body of text. The offshoot of this is that by claiming certain substrings as intellectual property of the company, other companies and individuals can be charged for using those substrings. Pat is hiring you to write software to help with this endeavor.
Over the course of the semester you will be required to write a number of classes that will form the backbone of their software system. You will begin with simpler aspects such as generating random substrings that might be useful for taking intellectual protections on. You will also work on trying to determine which substrings are potentially most profitable. This step is required because the effort and cost of getting intellectual protections on a given substring is quite large and only worth pursuing for those substrings that will turn a profit. This will first be done through comparisons of those substrings to standard English words and combinations of words taken randomly to determine the potential profitability of given substrings. Then later testing will be done by some comparisons with more realistic strings of English text.
During the later part of the semester you will write software that will actually determine how much money should be charged for given pieces of text given a particular pricing structure and integrate that into a more general tool that determines how much money to charge specific companies. The full tool could also be expected to keep track of the expenditures for particular web sites or publications over time. The exact rules of the system that you are to implement will be revealed through the assignment descriptions over the course of the semester.