Ruby Quiz wrote:
> 
> In Scrabble parlance, a 'bingo stem' is defined as a set of six
> letters that combines with a large fraction of the alphabet to anagram
> to valid seven letter words.
> 
> Write a program that, given a word list and a cutoff n, finds all 6
> letter stems that combine with n or more letters, sorted in order of
> how many distinct letters they combine with.

If this quiz is really just about Scrabble, can we assume the input word 
list will contain only 7-letter words?

If I filter my dictionary (2of4brif.txt) down to just 7-letter words, I 
can handle this task in less than an hour of wall-clock time on a 2GHz 
PC.  If I allow all words with 7 or more letters, I don't know if I'll 
be able to finish the processing in under a week's time.

I've certainly learned a few things about Ruby performance tuning along 
the way.

-- 
Glenn Parker | glenn.parker-AT-comcast.net | <http://www.tetrafoil.com/>