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I'm a bit surprised that there are anagrams to be found. It's easy to find them if they exist, but there's no guarantee at all that there actually should be co

I'm a bit surprised that there are anagrams to be found. It's easy to find them if they exist, but there's no guarantee at all that there actually should be collisions.

DanBC 12y ago
I'm not a statistician. Is it really that surprising? English has plenty of redundancy; Twitter statuses have limited length. What's surprising to me is the niceness of the found anagrams. "another math genius" / "he ain't smart enough".
- madcaptenor 12y ago
  I am a statistician. Maybe I should sit down and actually do some calculations.
  - sillysaurus3 12y ago
    Please do. I'd be interested.
- denzil_correa 12y ago
  > What's surprising to me is the niceness of the found anagrams. That's because they are manually curated [0] Q: Is this manually curated? A: Mostly for issues of volume ( there are a lot of variations of 'goooood mooornnniinng!', there are a lot of spam bots posting subtely different versions of the same message, etc) the bot doesn't automatically post every anagram it finds. Essentially there's an iphone client that reviews matches, which are manually approved or rejected. [0] https://github.com/cmyr/anagramatron https://github.com/cmyr/anagramatron
sirclueless 12y ago
It's actually extremely likely. The chance that any two statuses are anagrams is miniscule, and even the chance that a particular status has an anagram among all other statuses is probably small, but the chances that there are no collisions at all is tiny. See a description of the Birthday Paradox[1] for the mathematics behind this. For example, if you put 70 people in a room, there is a 99.9% chance that two people share a Birthday. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Strilanc 12y ago
Fermi estimate time! Anagrams are just sentences with the same letter counts. The anagrams they're posting have 25ish letters... how many ways are there to distribute 25 balls into 26 bins? (25+26)!/25!/26! is ~250 trillion. The birthday paradox square roots that down to ~10 million, and the fact that we prefer some bins (fewer Zs, more Es) probably cuts it down even further to ~1 million. So one anagram per million short tweets; hundreds per day. Doesn't seem too unreasonable.
- madcaptenor 12y ago
  Quick sanity check: most of the anagrams there are from short tweets, as you'd predict.

I'm a bit surprised that there are anagrams to be found. It's easy to find them if they exist, but there's no guarantee at all that there actually should be collisions.

DanBC 12y ago

I'm not a statistician. Is it really that surprising? English has plenty of redundancy; Twitter statuses have limited length. What's surprising to me is the niceness of the found anagrams. "another math genius" / "he ain't smart enough".

madcaptenor 12y ago
I am a statistician. Maybe I should sit down and actually do some calculations.
- sillysaurus3 12y ago
  Please do. I'd be interested.
denzil_correa 12y ago
> What's surprising to me is the niceness of the found anagrams. That's because they are manually curated [0] Q: Is this manually curated? A: Mostly for issues of volume ( there are a lot of variations of 'goooood mooornnniinng!', there are a lot of spam bots posting subtely different versions of the same message, etc) the bot doesn't automatically post every anagram it finds. Essentially there's an iphone client that reviews matches, which are manually approved or rejected. [0] https://github.com/cmyr/anagramatron https://github.com/cmyr/anagramatron

sirclueless 12y ago

It's actually extremely likely. The chance that any two statuses are anagrams is miniscule, and even the chance that a particular status has an anagram among all other statuses is probably small, but the chances that there are no collisions at all is tiny. See a description of the Birthday Paradox[1] for the mathematics behind this. For example, if you put 70 people in a room, there is a 99.9% chance that two people share a Birthday. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem

Strilanc 12y ago

Fermi estimate time! Anagrams are just sentences with the same letter counts. The anagrams they're posting have 25ish letters... how many ways are there to distribute 25 balls into 26 bins? (25+26)!/25!/26! is ~250 trillion. The birthday paradox square roots that down to ~10 million, and the fact that we prefer some bins (fewer Zs, more Es) probably cuts it down even further to ~1 million. So one anagram per million short tweets; hundreds per day. Doesn't seem too unreasonable.

madcaptenor 12y ago
Quick sanity check: most of the anagrams there are from short tweets, as you'd predict.