A Hobbyist Cracks Anagram Indexing Down to 11 Nanoseconds per Word
11 Nanoseconds per Word: Over-Optimizing Anagrams
When a Word Ladder solver took over a second to run, David G. Andersen rewrote it in Rust and kept optimizing. He starts at 173 nanoseconds per word, strips out Vec allocations, swaps string sorting for packed letter counts, and lands on a collision-free 64-bit prime-product key that fits every Scrabble word. Tuned primes and a fixed-length loop bring it to 11 nanoseconds per word, roughly 15 times faster than the baseline.
We've found a collision-free canonical 64-bit identifier for the bag of letters in a (Scrabble) word.