From: James Edward Gray II <james@...>
Date: 2004-12-19T06:50:26+09:00
Subject: Re: [QUIZ] Scrabble Stems (#12)

On Dec 18, 2004, at 3:42 PM, Glenn Parker wrote:

> Ruby Quiz wrote:
>> In Scrabble parlance, a 'bingo stem' is defined as a set of six
>> letters that combines with a large fraction of the alphabet to anagram
>> to valid seven letter words.
>> Write a program that, given a word list and a cutoff n, finds all 6
>> letter stems that combine with n or more letters, sorted in order of
>> how many distinct letters they combine with.
>
> If this quiz is really just about Scrabble, can we assume the input 
> word list will contain only 7-letter words?

I filtered out words less than and more than seven letters.

> If I filter my dictionary (2of4brif.txt) down to just 7-letter words, 
> I can handle this task in less than an hour of wall-clock time on a 
> 2GHz PC.  If I allow all words with 7 or more letters, I don't know if 
> I'll be able to finish the processing in under a week's time.
>
> I've certainly learned a few things about Ruby performance tuning 
> along the way.

Hmmm, I would say that it doesn't HAVE to take that long.  My program 
runs in under 30 seconds.  ;)

James Edward Gray II