From: Brian Candler <b.candler@...>
Date: 2009-10-21T18:14:12+09:00
Subject: Re: Randomly generated words from a set of letters

> what would you do?

If the result always has to be one of the pre-defined words, then the 
most efficient approach is to have all the words available and then just 
pick one from that set.

If you don't mind reading this whole list into RAM, then it's easy:

   word = words[rand words.size]

If it's huge and you want to keep it on disk, then I'd pre-format the 
dictionary as a CDB, where the key is a number in the range 0 to 
words.size-1.

http://cr.yp.to/cdb.html
http://raa.ruby-lang.org/project/cdb/

This allows any word to be found with at most two disk seeks.

If you have a SQL database already available in your application, just 
use that. Again, I'd give each word a sequence number between 0 and N-1 
to make it easy to pick one randomly.
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