!!Con 2017: I got the computer to find words with good anagrams and....!! by Mark Dominus
Channel: Confreaks
Date: 2017-05-18

I got the computer to find words with good anagrams and throw away the boring ones!! by Mark Dominus

25 years ago I got the computer to search the dictionary for words that were anagrams of one another. The results were voluminous, but mostly boring. So I tried helping the computer to understand which anagrams were boring so it could throw them away. This worked!

In 1992 I used a brute-force algorithm, which was pretty slow; the program took a few hours to run. This year I learned a more sophisticated algorithm to do the same thing and implemented it. The new program was super fast! It took only a few seconds.

I’ll explain both algorithms and reveal the surprising results!

Mark Dominus became interested in programming in the mid-1970s from watching his mom do it. He likes programming, anagrams, quilts, the moon, the sun, mathematics, and figs.