Hacker News Reader

So she went linearly through the whole alphabet until he found the letter he wanted? Sounds like somebody should have used a binary search! Hey-oooo!

View on HN

I wonder which would actually faster - binary search on the standard ordered alphabet or going linearly in order of letter frequency.

Even better - some hybrid algorithm that goes through the most common letters then goes into binary search for the remaining letters (many of which appear at approximately equal frequency)

You could probably also have a tree of the ~32 most common words. At the very beginning you could have a branch to choose whether you want to pick the 'word' tree or the 'letter' tree.

Binary search in unbalanced tree with shorter branches to more frequently used letters will be probably best (this is really huffman coding, isn't it?

Frequency order is analogous to Huffman coding while still being easy enough for a human to use, so it's probably better than binary search.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com