Average of two strings in alphabetical/lexicographical order

Question

Suppose you take the strings \'a\' and \'z\' and list all the strings that come between them in alphabetical order: [\'a\',\'b\',\'c\' ... \'x\',\'y\',\'z\']. Take the midpoint

Answer 1

It sounds like what you want, is to treat alphabetical characters as a base-26 value between 0 and 1. When you have strings of different length (an example in base 10), say 305 and 4202, your coming out with a midpoint of 3, since you're looking at the characters one at a time. Instead, treat them as a floating point mantissa: 0.305 and 0.4202. From that, it's easy to come up with a midpoint of .3626 (you can round if you'd like).

Do the same with base 26 (a=0...z=25, ba=26, bb=27, etc.) to do the calculations for letters:

cat becomes 'a.cat' and doggie becomes 'a.doggie', doing the math gives cat a decimal value of 0.078004096, doggie a value of 0.136390697, with an average of 0.107197397 which in base 26 is roughly "cumcqo"