9March2001: a new idea

i was bored in class and began playing around with words. you know the little puzzles where you change one word into another but one letter at a time. for example:

  sheep
  steep
  steel
  steal
  steam

and so on. anyway, being lazy i spent the rest of the class period working out an algorithm to generate the entire one-step word space for four-letter words (for instance) and draw it out in a picture or postscript file. if i write the optimization right we should see little clusters of words beginning with the same letter, etc.

but of course the same sort of algorithm can be generalized for any other sort of relationship between words. synonyms, for instance.

  cut
  slice
  dissect
  analyze
  understand

again, words that are more closely related will tend to cluster together. i just need to get my hands on a good dictionary/thesaurus in plaintext.