[fryguy]

Is it though? There's only 230k words in that list, and most words aren't that long. Building a trie and then trying all the permutations of all of the words seems like it would finish in a reasonable amount of time. Even then O(n^2) approach of comparing pairwise would probably get you to a reasonable time. Especially since this is a one-time thing and doesn't get run over and over.

And your argument is kind of silly when in the very same article when he uses brute force to see how many segments. Shouldn't he have found the most optimal algorithm for that instead of brute forcing it?

[eridius]

Sorting the words is significantly easier in virtually every programming language than testing all of the permutations. So the "it should finish in a reasonable amount of time" isn't a good excuse, since you're doing more work than necessary in order to implement the suboptimal solution.