Talk:Last letter-first letter
Number of names
This is equivalent to asking for the longest path in a directed graph, which is an NP-complete problem. That doesn't rule it out as a task, but running it on a graph with 646 nodes might take too long. Also, since it seems to be rare to use external files to store the data (or at least I haven't seen many tasks that call for that) having all the names in each example would get really cluttered. MagiMaster 20:52, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
- Re input data; I can always host input data if that makes it convenient to work on appropriate data. --Michael Mol 23:12, 5 June 2011 (UTC)
- That's not really the problem. A quick breadth first search implementation gave me 646 pokemon names, 1793 pokemon name pairs, 518546 pokemon name triples, 14745709 pokemon name quadruples, and I had to reboot my machine to recover from my attempt to represent all pokemon name quintuples. Inspecting this sequence suggests a search space on the order of 28^28 or about 3e40 sequences to investigate. That exceeds the storage capacity of my laptop. (Not to mention, exceeds my patience). Note that finding a long sequence is not very hard, it's finding the longest that makes this task hard. --Rdm 20:08, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
- If the part about using all the pokemon names was changed, it'd be an interesting task. 20 or so names/words/nodes should demonstrate the process well enough without being too slow. MagiMaster 21:37, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
- That's not really the problem. A quick breadth first search implementation gave me 646 pokemon names, 1793 pokemon name pairs, 518546 pokemon name triples, 14745709 pokemon name quadruples, and I had to reboot my machine to recover from my attempt to represent all pokemon name quintuples. Inspecting this sequence suggests a search space on the order of 28^28 or about 3e40 sequences to investigate. That exceeds the storage capacity of my laptop. (Not to mention, exceeds my patience). Note that finding a long sequence is not very hard, it's finding the longest that makes this task hard. --Rdm 20:08, 6 June 2011 (UTC)
Re problems with PicoLisp version, Nidoran can be male or female, and this is marked in the list with male and female (mars and venus) symbols. I'd suggest spelling out "Male" and "Female". Axtens 10:10, 7 June 2011 (UTC)
Unless someone has a reasonable algorithm that makes this doable then it should be deleted or modified. --Paddy3118 07:00, 7 June 2011 (UTC)