acrograms

find anagrams that also form a specific acronym

The code is forked from this useful working example of anagrams in haskell: purcell/haskell-anagrams

imagine you have the phrase "drunk video: if i'm in Greenland, i follow UFOs to Antarctica", and you want an anagram that fits the acronym "wfaoie". you can use this program, and you will find the solution: "Wild Frolicking Adventures of Informational Education"

why in the hell would you want to do that? well because that's actually a real example, from bill wurtz, and that is from where this program originates

usage

cabal run "wfaoie" "drunk video: if i'm in Greenland, i follow UFOs to Antarctica" +RTS -N

also take a look at readDict, where there are some compile-time options to consider such as:

• certain: words that are certainly in the solution
• dictionary: file to read valid words from (all lowercase, one word per line)

wfaoie

february 2019. bill wurtz has been working on a new non-music video for almost a month. we're all wondering what it is. what it's about. february 5 we're blessed with a piece of information: the initials of the title, wfaoie. on it's own it's mostly useless, if exciting. but on the 10th, we were given an anagram as well. an anagram on its own gives much potential, but has a massive solution space and it's anyone's say if an answer is "right". along with the acronym though, the solution space is much smaller. even, computable. so that's what i set out to do

technical and fork details

the main differences from upstream in the standard anagram finding are for optimization:

• DFS
  • since the solution space is so small, the order of searching is not as important as with plain anagrams
  • BFS was taking >16GB of memory for the size of anagram i needed
• String is actually faster than Data.Text AND Bytes, believe it or not

then of course there's the acronym-specific code. the general strategy is:

• recursively:
• filter words that fit the remaining letters of the anagram
• do not filter words based on acronym, but do ensure that tested words fit the acronym
  • believe it or not it's faster that way
• if not, try another set of words

there are a lot of subtle techniques used for optimization, which are outlined in my fedi thread