Hey guys, I'm loathe to ask what I'm sure is a pretty dumb question, but my googling skills have failed me. I've got a long string of a limited number of words, and I want to create a transition matrix that tells me how frequently word A goes to word B. What's the easiest way to generate something like this?

It's easy to see that you cannot do better than the naive solution. There are n words, and a simple left-to-right linear count will have a time complexity in Θ(n) if using a hash map to convert words into a matrix index (n.b. Θ(n) = Θ(cn) where c is the true mean number of letters per word in the superstring.) The easiest way to generate this matrix is to implement such an algorithm in a programming language.