This is a fun read, I've always enjoyed anagrams and palindromes. The "best anagram" was cinematographer megachiropteran.
However, it comes across as a little "smarter than thou" with the section:
"The thing you do not want to do is to compute every permutation of the letters of each word, looking for permutations that appear in the word list. That is akin to sorting a list by computing every permutation of the list and looking for the one that is sorted. I wouldn't have mentioned this, but someone on StackExchange actually asked this question."
That statement makes sense to me when I think about it, but it wouldn't have appeared as totally obvious to me from the outset. And I can't see casting derision at someone because they asked this question.
I think that paragraph perfectly demonstrates why all the commenters on Why I Don’t Talk to Google Recruiters (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13696004) who insist that programmers don't need to know algorithms are wrong. It should be immediately obvious to anyone with a cursory understanding of algorithms that computing all the permutations of every word is much more expensive than necessary, and from there it's not all that hard to figure out that sorting the letters produces the desired effect.
Is it though? There's only 230k words in that list, and most words aren't that long. Building a trie and then trying all the permutations of all of the words seems like it would finish in a reasonable amount of time. Even then O(n^2) approach of comparing pairwise would probably get you to a reasonable time. Especially since this is a one-time thing and doesn't get run over and over.
And your argument is kind of silly when in the very same article when he uses brute force to see how many segments. Shouldn't he have found the most optimal algorithm for that instead of brute forcing it?
Sorting the words is significantly easier in virtually every programming language than testing all of the permutations. So the "it should finish in a reasonable amount of time" isn't a good excuse, since you're doing more work than necessary in order to implement the suboptimal solution.
The observation that two words are anagrams if they contain all the same letters isn't a huge leap from two words that contain all the same letters are anagrams.
That being said: Sorting isn't required. (An O(kn) solution exists to beat your O(nk log k))
It's not entirely clear that the O(nk) solution actually wins because k is small in this case, and so log(k) is very small. Unless you do some careful bit packing, the O(nk) algorithm will use more memory, which could make it slower because of increased cache misses.
The O(nk) solution has fewer branches (O(1) versus O(log k)), and even if you use a naïve implementation, O(nk) will still fit into L1 (assuming n is bigger than k).
Not even close. The lexicon is 230k words, times 26 letters is nearly 6MB. The i7 has a 64kB L1 cache and a 246kB L2 cache.
I think the only way to resolve this would be to actually do the experiment. I wouldn't bet my life savings on the outcome either way, but I'll give you even odds at low stakes that sorting is faster.
Yeah, there are other solutions, such as allocating an array of 26 letters (ignoring accents) and using that to count, but sorting is easy and is generally fast enough.
It's probably obvious enough once you've buried your head in this train of thought continuously for weeks. Thank god we don't have to do that because this helpful person has just told us.
If it's not obvious, it's probably because you've slightly misunderstood the problem somewhere. You have a finite list of items, and you want to create matches between them based on how many of each letter they have. Now it's simple, right?
First time I found about this same approach to discover anagrams was in John Bentley's Programming Pearls, 1st Edition (which I believe came out in 1986, and was in itself a collection of columns from previous years).
However, it comes across as a little "smarter than thou" with the section:
"The thing you do not want to do is to compute every permutation of the letters of each word, looking for permutations that appear in the word list. That is akin to sorting a list by computing every permutation of the list and looking for the one that is sorted. I wouldn't have mentioned this, but someone on StackExchange actually asked this question."
That statement makes sense to me when I think about it, but it wouldn't have appeared as totally obvious to me from the outset. And I can't see casting derision at someone because they asked this question.