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Old 03-03-2008, 09:53 AM   #1
ggendel
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Join Date: Dec 2007
Device: Cybook 3
Searching Dictionaries

Hi,

I am planning a vacation to Italy this summer. Besides books on my Cybook, I figured an english->italian (and visa-versa) dictionary might be a good thing. But the dictionaries I've seen use the text entry function to find words of interest. Not having a keyboard on the Cybook (as well as others) makes things pretty ugly.

I was thinking of schemes to avoid this problem. My current thought is to use links and use a division search scheme to quickly find the word of interest.

The "table of contents" page would be a table containing <n> cells. For discussion, lets' say this is a 4x8 cell table. Then the words would be divided into 32 segments, and each cell would define the range for that region (A-balloon, etc.). Each cell links to a page that has another table covering that specific range, and so on until there are equal to or less than 32 entries per segment, in which case the cells would just have direct links.

So this is a high-order binary search. Any word in a 1,000,000 word dictionary can be retrieved in just 4 selections.

Anyone have a better scheme before I write a python script to generate this TOC hierarchy from my dictionaries words?

Thanks,
Gary
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