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

Sorry, but you can't do what you're looking for with levenshtein distance or similar. RGB and HSV are 3-dimensional geometric spaces, but levenshtein distance describes a metric space - a much looser set of contstraints with no fixed number of dimensions. There's no way to map a metric space into a fixed number of dimensions while always preserving locality.

As far as approximations go, though, for single terms you could use a modification of an algorithm like soundex or metaphone to pick a color; for multiple terms, you could, for example, apply soundex or metaphone to each word individually, then sum them up (with overflow).