Re: find words that contains some specific letters

From:
"Giovanni Azua" <bravegag@hotmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.java.programmer
Date:
Mon, 1 Jun 2009 14:59:13 +0200
Message-ID:
<78i1lbF1m69gkU1@mid.individual.net>
Hi John,

"John B. Matthews" <nospam@nospam.invalid> wrote in

Another approach is to permute the letters and search the dictionary.
A binary search of an ordered word list is O(log n), worst case.
Here's an example in Ada:

<http://home.roadrunner.com/~jbmatthews/jumble.html>

In Java, permutations can be checked quickly with the contains() method
of the Set interface, once the dictionary is read:

private static final String NAME = "/usr/share/dict/words";
private static final Set<String> set = new TreeSet<String>();
static {
   try {
       File file = new File(NAME);
       BufferedReader in = new BufferedReader(
           new InputStreamReader(new FileInputStream(file)));
       String s;
       while ((s = in.readLine()) != null) {
           set.add(s);
       }
   } catch (IOException ex) {
       System.err.println(ex.getMessage());
   }
}

Finding the permutations of a string in Java is straightforward:

<http://www.google.com/search?q=java+permute>


I was wondering what the overall lookup complexity would be here ...

Assuming "n" being the number of letters in a search word and "m" the total
number of words in the dictionary then the complexity would be:

o(n! * log2 m) => O(n! * log m) isn't this NP complexity? I am looking for
the exponential function that approximates n! I remember in class we used to
evaluate complexity using the O notation with exponential function rather
than n! ...

Best regards,
Giovanni

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