

What's your greatest hack? - fnazeeri


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jonmrodriguez
With only 17 hours caffeinated to go before a weekly meeting with my research
advisor, and desperate to create some results to show, I accidentally
reinvented the Rabin-Karp algorithm for string search:

<http://stanford.edu/~jonr1/software-faire-poster.jpg> (see center panel)

My thought process at the time was: Shit, brute force string search takes over
ten minutes on my data! There must be a way to speed this up. Hm. It probably
involves hashing somehow...

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pestaa
Was it the caffeine or the time constraint? :) Great hack nevertheless!

I wonder if the data in question was indexed, it'd have solved your problem in
an instant?

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jonmrodriguez
Mostly the time constraint.

Nah, it wasn't indexed, hence the necessity to build up such an index as the
first step of the algorithm.

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pestaa
Yes I realized that, my question was more like, "couldn't you just put the
data in a relational database or a full text search engine and avoid
reinventing?".

Depends on the scenario, of course, and judging by how you solved it, yours
seems like an exception, and not rule.

