You are right, because I check against all 8 character words and 'aaaaaa' only has six and therefore it is not considered. To be absolutely certain one would have to check against all combinations of 8 characters, i.e. checking your whole dictionary against each of 208 827 064 576 combinations.So my solution answers the question with one extra condition: that the 8 characters together form a word too. And I seem to have an "off by one error" somewhere.
CountZero A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James My blog: Imperial Deltronics
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I am getting somehow similar results. The difference is, I guess, that I initialize the count with the number of occurrences of the combination before adding the shorter words. The script runs for 3min26s, the output ends with
adeimrst: 310
aeilnrst: 312
adeinrst: 313
aeloprst: 313
aeilnpst: 314
adeoprst: 316
adeilrst: 319
aeimprst: 328
adeiprst: 332
aeilprst: 344
aeinprst: 346
The script:
Update: Checking the result:
$ grep -E '^[aeinprst]{1,8}$' 2of12inf.txt | grep -vE '(.).*\1' | wc
+-l
346
Update 2: Testing duplicate characters:
$ grep -E '(.).*\1.*:' 1056884.out | tail -n1
aeiprsst: 279
$ grep -E '^[aeiprsst]{1,8}$' 2of12inf.txt | grep -Ev '([aeiprt]).*\1|
+s.*s.*s' | wc -l
279
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choroba,
I am bleary eye tired but I wanted to review your code because you mentioned it didn't consider all combinations - only possible combinations.
If I have understood what you have done, this is not guaranteed to produce the correct answer on all dictionary files. It happens to get the right answer for 2of12inf.txt however. You appear to only be considering the combinations of letters of individual words rather than considering taking some from one word and some from another. Consider the following dictionary:
abcd
acdb
adbc
dabc
bcad
efgh
fgeh
hegf
egfh
fegh
abcdxy
efghlm
The obvious answer is 'abcdefgh' which will get 10 words but your code chooses both 'abcdxy' and 'efghlm' with 6 words each.
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CountZero,
I am going to write a brute force solution this weekend but your math isn't quite right. First, you don't need all 26^8th since order doesn't matter. The upper bound is less than 5.2 million. We can reduce it further if we consider the maximum number of times a given letter can repeat. We do not have to consider a worst-case scenario dictionary so I think I can get that 5.2 million down to around 3 million. We still need to compare each of those 3 million against tens of thousands of words so I will be using C to do it but I think run time will be much less than 24 hours.
Update: My math was off somewhere. The upper bound was 13_884_156 and I was only able to reduce it down to 12_461_993. Since my word list contains 40,933 words (filtered down from 81_536), that means I am up to 510_106_759_469 checks. In order to finish in under 24 hours, I will need to be able to do 5.9 million checks per second. I hope my C skills are up for the challenge (stay tuned).
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I did some more analysing the 2of12inf.txt dictionary and for words of maximum 8 characters, this is the maximum number of the same characters that can exist in any one word:
a => 4,
b => 3,
c => 3,
d => 4,
e => 4,
f => 4,
g => 4,
h => 3,
i => 3,
j => 2,
k => 3,
l => 4,
m => 3,
n => 4,
o => 4,
p => 3,
q => 1,
r => 4,
s => 5,
t => 3,
u => 4,
v => 2,
w => 3,
x => 2,
y => 3,
z => 4,
In other words, choose all combinations of any 8 chars out of the following string: "aaaabbbcccddddeeeeffffgggghhhiiijjkkkllllmmmnnnnoooopppqrrrrssssstttuuuuvvwwwxxyyyzzzz" and run your dictionary against each of these and your search is exhaustive.Of course that is still about 2.14 E15 combinations to check, but many of these will be the same. So, perhaps someone with more mathematical skills than I can write an efficient generator for these combinations that does not have to go through them all to weed out the duplicates.
CountZero A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James My blog: Imperial Deltronics
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