Here's a similar case: Ranking of poker hands. That can involve many of the same steps, like sorting a small list of inputs (5 or 7 cards) into a normalized configuration (three-of-a-kind is represented as AAABC where B > C) and taking a hash to memoize the result. And you sure might want that in a tight inner loop if you're writing a poker simulator or AI where you want to crunch a few billion iterations.