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- U N J U M B L E v1.14
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- Unjumble accepts groups of 3 to 8 letters and tries to make English words
- from them.
-
- Unjumble is public domain and may be freely distributed.
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- ------------------- H O W T O U S E U N J U M B L E -------------------
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- To run Unjumble type "UNJUMBLE" at the CLI prompt, or double-click its
- icon.
-
- A brief set of instructions will be displayed, and then a prompt for you
- to enter a group of letters. If you enter more than eight letters or
- less than 3 letters an error message will be displayed. If you enter
- anything that is not a letter (a-z; A-Z) then an appropriate message is
- displayed.
-
- After you enter the 3-8 letters a list of possible words will be
- displayed. The list will be from 0 to 20 items long. The most probable
- words, in Unjumble's opinion, will be near the top, although words will
- often show up near the end. A number will appear before each item, which
- is Unjumble's opinion of how likely the item is an English word.
-
- To quit, press <RETURN> without any preceeding characters.
-
- The amount of time required to generate the list of items depends on how
- many letters are entered. For a stock Amiga 2000:
-
- Number Number
- of Seconds of
- letters required Permutations
- ------- -------- ------------
- 3 0 6
- 4 0 24
- 5 0 120
- 6 1 720
- 7 3 5,040
- 8 18 40,320
-
- You can't stop Unjumble once it starts working on a group of letters, but
- the longest you will have to wait is about 18 seconds.
-
- Do not RUN Unjumble, as in "RUN Unjumble", because it won't work.
-
- Remember that when you enter a 8 letter word, the odds are one in
- 2,016 that the word would show up in the list of twenty by pure chance.
- Unjumble will beat the odds by quite a bit.
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- ------------------ H O W U N J U M B L E W O R K S --------------------
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- Unjumble analyzes each string of letters by looking at the trigrams in
- it. A trigram is a group of three letters, such as AAA, AAB, ING, QQQ,
- etc. The trigram ING is much more likely to occur in an English word
- than QQQ, so any item that contains ING is more likely to be a word than
- one containing QQQ.
-
- Unjumble creates every possible arrangement (permutation) of the letters
- in the string and looks at all of the trigrams in each arrangement. Each
- trigram is assigned a weight based on (the log base 2 of) how often it
- occurred in a dictionary of 38,500 words. The sum of the weights for
- all of the trigrams in a string is the number listed along with each
- item. A table of up to twenty arrangements is kept, with duplicates due
- to multiple occurrences of a single letter eliminated (e.g., kEEp).
- After all of the arrangements have been tested, the table of the ones
- with the highest weights is displayed.
-
- Unjumble knows the weights for about 4300 trigrams that occurred in the
- dictionary file. With 26 letters in the alphabet there are 26*26*26 (or
- 17,576) possible trigrams.
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- -------------------------- W H O D I D I T ----------------------------
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- Ron Charlton
- 9002 Balcor Circle
- Knoxville, TN 37923
-
- Phone: (615)694-0800
-
- Plink: R*CHARLTON
- BITNET: charltr@utkvx1
-
- 05-Jul-90
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- ------------------------------ B A S I S --------------------------------
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- The idea of using trigrams as the basis for an unjumbler came from an
- article in BYTE magazine by Bob Keefer (July 1986, p. 113).
-
-
-