Re: A Better Word Morph Builder

Crazy idea. Since one can compute the Hamming distance between the initial words, and this is a mininum length of any possible solution path, you can eliminate any paths of shorter length as solutions. Of course, you'd need to know the paths to know the lengths, so this may not be a realizable optimization, but at least you could avoid testing for the solution until you're past the minimum distance. Just trade space for speed and precompute every path.

--Solo

--
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Comment on Re: A Better Word Morph Builder

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Re^2: A Better Word Morph Builder by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Jun 29, 2006 at 17:10 UTC
Solo, My EA idea, which is likely flawed, would work as follows: Assuming you start with a distance of 7 and the current word is a distance of 3 - any paths that would increase this distance above 3 wouldn't be allowed to survive. Do you mean Hamming distance? Since we are only using valid words, no path could ever be shorter than the Hamming distance. ...but at least you could avoid testing for the solution until you're past the minimum distance. `love - shit (Hamming Distance = 4) love-lore-sore-sort-soot-shot-shit (Actual Distance = 6)` [download] Not testing may seem like a win but I doubt it. This is because there is no significant difference between $cur_dist > $min_dist and $word eq $tgt. Just trade space for speed and precompute every path If you mean precompute every path from every word to any other word it can reach, this certainly would be faster runtime. Unfortunately, I doubt this would be practical. If you mean precompute all paths from the source and then only look at the paths that are beyond the minimum distance, this is a gamble because you won't know how many paths exist beyond the actual solution. The current method is to abort searching when a path is found. Cheers - L~R	[reply] [d/l]

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Re^2: A Better Word Morph Builder
by Limbic~Region (Chancellor) on Jun 29, 2006 at 17:10 UTC

Solo

Assuming you start with a distance of 7 and the current word is a distance of 3 - any paths that would increase this distance above 3 wouldn't be allowed to survive.

Do you mean Hamming distance?

Since we are only using valid words, no path could ever be shorter than the Hamming distance.

...but at least you could avoid testing for the solution until you're past the minimum distance.

love - shit                        (Hamming Distance = 4)
love-lore-sore-sort-soot-shot-shit (Actual Distance  = 6)
[download]

Not testing may seem like a win but I doubt it. This is because there is no significant difference between $cur_dist > $min_dist and $word eq $tgt.

Just trade space for speed and precompute every path

If you mean precompute every path from every word to any other word it can reach, this certainly would be faster runtime. Unfortunately, I doubt this would be practical. If you mean precompute all paths from the source and then only look at the paths that are beyond the minimum distance, this is a gamble because you won't know how many paths exist beyond the actual solution. The current method is to abort searching when a path is found.

Cheers - L~R

[reply]
[d/l]

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