Greetings all;
I have a piece of code I've been fiddling around with thats designed to emulate natural speech, learning from users input. (Very simply, a learning chatterbox).

I've been surprised by how much memory the data takes up, given how small it is when written to disk. I use twin hashes, storing practically the same data, but in a different order. The script learns a sentence in two directions (front to back, back to front) so it can generate a sentence in either direction from a given keyword.
Right now each hash, on disk, takes up 727k (1.4M "brain") - but when loaded into the hash, takes up a remarkable 16M! (I've loaded the software without data to verify).
My hash is put together like so:

$VAR1 = {
          'Word1_Word2' => {
                             'Sym1' => 3,
                             'Sym2' => 1 
                           },           
          'Word3_Word4' => {
                             'Sym4' => 3,
                             'Sym3' => 1
                           },
          'Word5_Word6' => {
                             'Sym5' => 1
                           }
        };

[download]
For comparison, I write every entry to disk in the format: 
Word1 \a Word2 \00 Sym1 \00 3 \n

[download]
Can you fine gentlemonks suggest a better way of storing data in memory, while also being easy to reference?
My thanks,

JP,
-- Alexander Widdlemouse undid his bellybutton and his bum dropped off --

In reply to A more memory efficient storage structure? by JPaul

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