From: Pit Capitain <pit@...>
Date: 2002-02-09T11:47:39+09:00
Subject: Re: Reg: tiny contest: who's faster? (add_a_gram)

On 9 Feb 2002, at 8:19, Dave Thomas wrote:

> grady@xcf.berkeley.edu (Steven Grady) writes:
> 
> > My solution takes under a minute on my machine; the majority is the
> > building of the word hashes.  Some of the basic techniques are:
> 
> I'm not sure if we're necessarily going for speed, but the following
> runs about three times faster on my box. The time taken reading in
> seems to swamp the other times. 1.7 runs it about 5% faster, which is
> surprising: I thought the GC mods would make a bigger difference.

Hi Dave, your code is fast, but you are cheating (a little bit ;-)
Here are two word lists that break the algorithm:

Longest add-a-gram not beginning at 3 or less letters:

  nitons
  intones
  mentions
  nominates
  antimonies
  inseminator
  terminations
  antimodernist
  determinations
  underestimation
  underestimations
  ant
  ante
  antre
  atoner
  another
  antihero
  anorthite
  anorthites
  antistrophe
  attorneyship

Longest add-a-gram with less than 12 letters:

  at
  ant
  ante

To be able to compare several implementations, we should specify 
the programs' task more clearly:

* Should it only work with the given or with any word list?
* Should it only print the last word or the whole sequence?
* In which form should it print the result?
* Is it allowed to use C extensions or has it to be pure Ruby?

Regards,
Pit