ANN: BoggleSolver now on sample stacks

[J. Landman Gay]

This is fantastic! I've often wondered how many possible words there are in any given grid. The 
web interface is much better than the last time I tried one, very speedy response after the 
initial load. And even that is much better than it used to be.

I'll grab the stack next. Cool.


On 1/2/22 5:42 PM, Alex Tweedly via use-livecode wrote:
> 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.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> use-livecode mailing list
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com
> Please visit this url to subscribe, unsubscribe and manage your subscription preferences:
> http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/use-livecode


-- 
Jacqueline Landman Gay         |     jacque at hyperactivesw.com
HyperActive Software           |     http://www.hyperactivesw.com