ANN: BoggleSolver now on sample stacks

[Alex Tweedly]

I've put a little 'game' up on "sample stacks", and also on the web.

It "solves" Boggle style puzzles, i.e. you give it a 5x5 grid of 
letters, and it finds all words within it, following the prescribed 
rules - words are formed by moving to adjacent (including diagonal) grid 
positions, and you cannot re-use a grid position within a word. You can 
modify the input field, and click on "Solve it" to see the new results.

The list of words is that used by Jacqueline in her JQBoggle game.

The UI is very basic - but there is one clever (I think) thing within 
it. It uses a dictionary of words which is a hierarchical 
character-by-character array, so it represents not only "what is a word" 
but also "what can be the initial substring of a word", and therefore it 
can prune the search tree immediately. This takes the time to solve a 
puzzle down from approx 10 - 50 minutes using a simple dictionary, to 
around 40 millisecs.

NB I have also built a Web-based standalone version of it using 10.0.0 
(dp1), which can be found at

https://www.tweedly.org/BoggleSolver/BoggleSolver.html

Note - the "Load URL ..." portion does not yet work in the web version. 
Loading is fairly slow, but the run times re (IMHO) impressive - 80msecs 
against the 40msecs or so running in the IDE. I am very impressed by the 
performance of this early web implementation.

Having a 'solver' like this opens up possible new games such as:

1. given we have 25 grid positions, and 25 letters (omitting 'Q'), what 
arrangement of letters gives the most, or least, words.

2. given a random selection of letters, what arrangement gives 
most/least words.

3. (a 2-player game) given an arrangement of letters, change one letter 
and increase the number of words that can be formed; score the value of 
the increase (or decrease), playing alternately, until neither player 
can get a positive score change.

Alex.