Or more accurately, you'll have a greater chance of finding the word starting with a letter that more commonly starts words than other letters. The most common letter is e, but it doesn't start as many words as s or t, so you could start there. Like i said, it's not proven, but i'm hypothesizing that it would reduce the amount of time used to find the word.

I doubt it. If you consider the words to be equiprobable, then the probability for the code to lie in some subset of the dictionary is directly proportional to the size of the subset. So, the probability and the average time increase accordingly and the strategy is of no help.

If the words were not equiprobable, instead, then the most advisable course of action would be choosing them ordered by probability (divided by a cost function if one wants to take length or other parameters into account).

Cheers

Antonio

The blackness of the night echoes my soul - A. Tucket

In reply to Re: Re: Dreams of Probability by abell
in thread Dreams of Probability by Nitrox

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.