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in reply to Generate unique ids of maximum length

The "as similar as possible to the old ones" is what makes it difficult. How would you define it in a way that a computer understands?

And how dissimilar are you allowed to get, if you save on the length?

CountZero

A program should be light and agile, its subroutines connected like a string of pearls. The spirit and intent of the program should be retained throughout. There should be neither too little or too much, neither needless loops nor useless variables, neither lack of structure nor overwhelming rigidity." - The Tao of Programming, 4.1 - Geoffrey James

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Re^2: Generate unique ids of maximum length
by lima1 (Curate) on Apr 13, 2010 at 11:07 UTC
    Hm, good point. Probably something like the edit distance, but with the preference to keep the prefix and suffix to make the ids readable. So one simple algorithm would optimize the sum of edit distances under the constraint that the ids have to be unique.