Re^4: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words

TJPride,
What do you mean by brute force, exactly? There are far too many possible letter combinations to just check each one.

As I pointed out elsewhere in this thread, you don't need to check all 26^8 possibilities since order of letters doesn't matter. That leaves 13_884_156 possible 8 letter combinations. Since I am using a specific dictionary and no word allows a single letter to repeat more than 5 times, I can further reduce that down to 12_461_993. Since my word list contains 40,933 words, that means I am up to 510_106_759_469 checks. In order to finish in under 24 hours, I will need to be able to do 5.9 million checks per second. I hope my C skills are up for the challenge (stay tuned).

Cheers - L~R

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Re^5: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by choroba (Cardinal) on Oct 05, 2013 at 00:31 UTC
I am not sure whether my solution is correct, but if it is, it is much faster, because it only checks the possible combinations, not all of them. لսႽ† ᥲᥒ⚪⟊Ⴙᘓᖇ Ꮅᘓᖇ⎱ Ⴙᥲ𝇋ƙᘓᖇ	[reply]
Re^6: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Oct 05, 2013 at 02:53 UTC
choroba, I intentionally chose not to review anyone else's code until after mine was finished (20 minutes ago). I peeked at something BrowserUk put up simply because he said it was brute force and then indicated it finished in a few seconds. It is pretty late here but I will check out solutions tomorrow. Feel free to critique mine before then :-D Cheers - L~R	[reply]
Re^5: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by LanX (Saint) on Oct 05, 2013 at 00:39 UTC
> That leaves 13_884_156 possible 8 letter combinations. Since I am using a specific dictionary and no word allows a single letter to repeat more than 5 times, I think pre-investigating the dictionary should dramatically limit this number. Just find the real maximum repetition for each letter. Cheers Rolf ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)	[reply]
Re^6: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Oct 05, 2013 at 02:38 UTC
LanX, I did that but it didn't reduce it dramatically. As I pointed out elsewhere, that only gets it down to 12_461_993. Cheers - L~R	[reply]
Re^7: Challenge: 8 Letters, Most Words by LanX (Saint) on Oct 05, 2013 at 14:51 UTC
Yeah I agree about 12_461_993 Anyway you don't need to check against all words in the dictionary, only taking the (at most) 256 subsets of a potential 8 letter combination. (less if letters are repeated) This can be done in a lookup in a prepared count-hash with normalized keys. Cheers Rolf ( addicted to the Perl Programming Language)	[reply]