On Thu, 07 May 2015 10:41:34 -0700, Dave Dyer <ddyer@real-me.net> wrote:

Here's a real life problem. I have a lot of strings (~20,000) which are permutations of 14 letter "words" starting with ABCDEFGHIJKLMN

I suspect a lot of these words are similar, meaning they have a large number of letters in the same position. Checking for identical words is trivial - just sort and compare adjacents. Is there an approach better than the brute force 20,000! pairwise comparisons to find similar permutations?

Wouldn't that be 20000*19999/2 = 199990000 *pairwise* comparisons ? Not a lot by today's standards. Leo