Re^4: Turning A Problem Upside Down

BrowserUk,
I am sorry my example still wasn't optimal. The dictionary I was using is the Scrabble Tournament Words List (TWL) as referenced in this somewhat related post. It comes in at just under 179,000 words. The Word Twister game only has two possible input lengths but I only play the 7 length version as it is the max. Of course, when I took up the quest of turning the problem on its head, I had already written a solver that could produce all valid words 4 or 5 times in the allocated period. My quest was to go beyond that and see what I could come up with if the dictionary and length of original input weren't so low. Again, this was just an academic exercise in exploration and my solution still assumes that the dictionary is relatively static even if it could be much larger.

Thanks again for your responses. I will review them tonight when I have peace and quiet.

Cheers - L~R

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Re^5: Turning A Problem Upside Down by BrowserUk (Patriarch) on Aug 22, 2009 at 20:13 UTC
The nearest wordlist I could find to that was this one. It takes a couple of seconds longer to index than my 90,000 word list, but the time taken to locate the words hardly changes at all as the main oparations remains ORing & AND NOTing 26 bitstrings (essentially O(1)), and then the final filtering: `C:\test>wc -l TWL06.txt 178691 TWL06.txt C:\test>790206.pl apetpxl ale alp alt ape apex app appel apple applet apt ate axe axel axle eat eta exalt expat lap lappet lat late latex lax lea leap leapt lept lepta let lex pal pale palet palp pap pat pate pax pea peal peat pelt pep pepla pet petal plat plate plea pleat plex tae tael tale tap tape tax tea teal tel tela tepa tepal Found 64 words in 0.23` [download] You don't say what the "certain time frame" is, but presumably as this is intended for the human brain rather than computer, it is in the order of minutes rather than sub 1 second? Even if I feed in the entire alphabet--which means it must select all the words via the bitstrings and then filter out all those that contain duplicates. ie. worse case--it only takes just over 8 seconds: `C:\test>790206.pl >nul abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz Found 36409 words in 8.46` [download] Examine what is said, not who speaks -- Silence betokens consent -- Love the truth but pardon error. "Science is about questioning the status quo. Questioning authority". In the absence of evidence, opinion is indistinguishable from prejudice. RIP PCW It is as I've been saying!(Audio until 20090817)	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re^6: Turning A Problem Upside Down by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Aug 23, 2009 at 23:58 UTC
BrowserUk, Youo don't say what the "certain time frame" is,... The time limit is 2 minutes but the majority of the time in my code is with an artificial delay in Win32::GuiTest's SendKeys() to not overwhelm the game. I have not used bitmasks in the past quite the way you have here. It obviously has a huge advantage over my approach when the given input length grows. Some day I will pick your brain on this. Thanks again. Cheers - L~R	[reply]