Suffix Tree Dreams

One day, I will understand suffix trees, and I will implement them in Ruby and find the longest repeated substring in Hamlet and run benchmarks. Then after that, I’ll, uh, write it for Ruby in C, which I only know a tiny bit about because of posts like this one about heap memory and ruby strings. DREAM BIG LOL

For now, all I see is this gem called rubytree, which I haven’t even tried yet, but it appears to have a general node-based tree and a binary tree.

I care because we did this (find the longest repeated substring) as a contest in cs170 in 2003 and sometimes Peterson and I still talk about it even though it was nearly a decade ago. I came in 43rd out of 113 then. I really, really wish I just copied my code into my livejournal back then, because I would have loved to see it now. I used to do stuff. I wonder if I have a backup buried somewhere on an old hard drive.

One day. In that marknelson.us article, I get the parts about the suffix trie, but the parts about the suffix tree are too much for me to masticate.

In other news, I am reading JavaScript: The Good Parts on Jen-Mei‘s recommendation, and dreaming about going to Fluent (o’reilly javascript conference) in May.

JavaScript: The Good Parts has a butterfly on its cover. I wonder what language Nabokov would program in. What is the most extravagant, versatile, expressive language? Also, what languages are like Russian, then what languages are like English? Maybe English is like JavaScript… cobbled together from a bunch of influences.

Also, 5:50AM WHYYYYY

1 comment

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *