I'm not very good at anagrams, so I've decided to write my own anagram solver. Now, as long as I have access to my laptop, I'll be able to impress my friends.
- Solve one-word anagrams
- Solve multi-word anagrams
- Build a web front end so I can do it sneaky-like on my phone
Any two anagrams can be compared (slowly) in two sorting operations,
acb -> abc
cba -> abc
=> acb is an anagram of cba
Abstracting away briefly, suppose we take map letter as a prime,
primify:
a = 2
b = 3
c = 5
...
z = 101
And define a function
numberfy(word):
out = 1
for letter in word:
out *= primify(letter)
Then it's trivial to show,
numberfy('acb') = 30
numberfy('cba') = 30
OK
This is much quicker, and serves as a core primitive in the solver. Then, each dictionary word can be expressed by the following map,
F: numberfy -> word
F(2286526) = apple
F(44376) = banana
It's possible that some words in the dictionary are already anagrams of each other, in which case we can map numberfy to a list of words.
Step one is building the map.