Korn Shell Puzzle?

[Sleepycat]

Korn Shell

The 26 alphabetic keys on a standard keyboard have been randomly swapped.

A user comes by and tries to type his name on the keyboard, pressing the key labeled with the letter he intends to type. Since the keys have been swapped, a different set of letters appears on the screen when he does this.

He looks at the new letters that have appeared on the screen and types those in, producing a new set of letters. He decides that it would be fun to continue doing this, and proceeds to keep typing in each new set of letters as they appear.

As it happens, after doing this a certain number of times, his real name will actually appear on the screen correctly. For example, given a particular swapping, the output might look like the following:

Jodt Dabn
Kafh Flcn
Dlmw Mgzn
Fgjq Jixn
Mike Korn

Given a particular name (e.g. "Mike Korn"), what is the maximum number of times the user might have to try typing in his name (or whatever has appeared on the screen) until his real name appears, if the manner in which the keys have been mixed up is unknown?

Write a program to compute this given a name as input. Your program should take a name (first name, last name; it should certainly not have any problem taking three-word names as well) as a command-line argument and output the answer:

$ ./korn Mike Korn
[the answer]

You may use any of the following programming languages:

* C++
* Java
* JavaScript
* OCaml/SML
* Perl
* PHP
* Python

For extra credit, you may submit additional solutions in the other languages as well as solutions in languages not listed here.