Re: [FWP] Jotto jot-matcher

["Bernie Cosell" <bernie@rev.net>]

On 7 Aug 99, at 9:17, Matthew Wickline wrote:

> bernie@fantasyfarm.com wrote:
> > boolean subroutine to determine whether a word matches 
> > a probe/jots result; _fast_ is more important than small.


> So now the problem is reduced to finding the number of jotts
> a probe should get for a given target word. I don't know
> that this is the fastest way to do it, but this seems good
> to me:
> 
> sub get_jotts {
>     my($probe, $target) = @_;
>     my %letters;
>     for ( split('',$target) )
>         { $letters{$_}++ };
>     my $jotts = 0;
>     for ( split('',$probe)  )
>         {$jotts++ if $letters{$_}-- > 0};
>     $jotts;
> }

I was musing a bit [after my previous response here] and I can come up with a 
slight improvement, I think.  There's no need to generate that hash every time 
[since you'll be checking a LOT of words].  Not sure how to initialize it 
quickly [it'd be neat if there was some way to pre-calculate the whole mess and 
"load it" in a real-fast swoop], but if the master word list had a precomputed 
hash for each word stored as a list.  Then in the subr, instead of the first 
loop it could just do:
   my %letters = @$wordletters ;

It is easy enough to precalculate these lists and write them to a file, that I 
guess would look like:
    RADAR    ('R', 3, 'D', 1, 'A', 2)
    STEEL    ('E', 2, 'T', 1, 'S', 1, 'L', 1)
     [...etc.. for several thousand more...]

Then the program initialization would suck up that whole mess somehow.  This is 
a place I"d be inclined to use a hash: $wordlist{'word'} = ref to array of 
'letters'.  You'd 'delete' the words as you eliminated them from contention.

[that'd make the inner loop of the checker be something like:

     foreach my $wd (keys %wordlist)
     {
         delete $wordlist{$wd} if &count_jots($wd, $probe) != $jots ;
     }

then you'd make a guess by doing:
     my $probe = (keys %wordlist)[rand(keys %wordlist)] ;

  /Bernie\
-- 
Bernie Cosell                   Roanoke Electronic Village
mailto:bernie@rev.net           Roanoke, VA


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