!!Con 2017: I got the computer to find words with good anagrams and....!! by Mark Dominus
22I 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.