Mapping arbitrary strings to RGB values

Question

I have a huge set of arbitrary natural language strings. For my tool to analyze them I need to convert each string to unique color value (RGB or other). I need color contras

Answer 1

First, you'll need to pick a way to measure string similarity. Minimal edit distance is traditional, but is not sufficient to well-order the strings, which is what you will need if you want to allocate the same colours to the same strings every time - perhaps you could weight the edit costs by alphabetic distance. Also minimal edit distance by itself may not be very useful if what you are after is similarity in speech rather than in written form (if so, consider a stemming/soundex pass first), or some other sense of "similarity".

Then you need to pick a way of traversing the visible colour space based on that metric. It may be helpful to consider using HSL or HSV colour representation - the algorithm could then become as simple as picking a starting hue and walking the sorted corpus, assigning the current hue to each string before offsetting it by the string's difference from the previous one.