I know that somewhere out there, someone has this information, but I can’t seem to find it.
Imagine you have ten empty shelves. You’re going to fill these shelves with books, and assume that you want to shelve the books alphabetically by author. Further assume that the books you want to shelve are more-or-less randomly distributed by author’s names. Now, the catch is that you want to determine what alphabetical range to assign to each shelf before you start putting the books on.
Presumably the information you need is the distribution of fiction books in English along an axis of author names. Then you could figure out how to divide this into ten intervals that would, on average, contain the same number of books from any pool of randomly selected books of English language fiction.
In computer geek terms, what I want is a hashing function that I can use to assign items to a particular list, so that sorting of the sublists will be easier, and so that subsequent merging of the sublists with a much larger master list would be optimal. In order for the hash function to be optimal, of course, I need to know a lot about the likely distribution of keys–and I don’t have that information.
8 comments for “I would like some obscure information”