If you've ever misspelled a word while searching on Google, you've benefitted from decades of distance algorithm development. In this talk we'll break down some popular distance measurements and see how they can be implemented in Ruby. We'll look at real world applications with some live demos. It won't matter if you get your kicks "Hamming" it up, if you drink your coffee in a "Levenshtein", or if you're new to Ruby: this talk is Rated R, for "all Rubyists". You'll be guaranteed to walk away with O(n^n) expectations met.