From: MR-Mencel@...
Date: 2009-10-20T23:50:29+09:00
Subject: Randomly generated words from a set of letters

Hi,

I have an interesting problem to solve and thought I'd ask for some input here.  We're developing an application and one part of it is building a random combination for this lock...

http://wordlock.com/_pdf/Wordlock-Bikelock-Instructions.pdf

So there are four columns, each contains a specific set of letters.

That PDF doc contains a pretty extensive list of pre-defined English words, but it is not a list of ALL possible words.  So I can think of a couple options...

1) Manually add the pre-defined word set to a DB table and randomly pull a word out as needed.

2) Each time I need a word, build a random word from the set of letters and compare to a dictionary somewhere to make sure I have a real English word.

3) Build a complete random word set one time (as in 1 but with all possible word combinations) and store in the DB to pull from randomly.


So...what would you do?  1 is probably easiest....but 2 is more interesting for me from a problem solving standpoint.

Just looking for some thoughts.

Thanks,
Matt