Project 4: Solvle

Okay, so I'm pretty proud of myself for this one. Using the methods from my previous project, I added the ability to, given a particular arrangement of letters from a game of Boggle, find all the words possible according to the rules of the game.

This is accomplished by the same basic method that a human would use while playing the same game: starting with a letter, move on to the adjacent or diagonal tiles to find any English words. I used the ENABLE word list which is a free text-based Scrabble dictionary in exactly the format I needed.

The first working version of the search took a good 90 seconds on my computer, which seemed way too long for practical use. It was searching literally EVERYTHING, though, even after it would be impossible to find additional words. In other words, if searching on a path yielded "ASDF", which isn't a substring of anything, it would keep on searching all possible subpaths which would all yield nothing. One line of code later, and the search results are visible by the time the mouse button has been lifted up.

It works great, as verified by a few games of Noggin (I'm not a habitual cheater, I just wanted to test it out). The only words I didn't get were verified as not being in my dictionary file. Aside from those, Solvle found every single word on the list in a fraction of a second. Fun.

One thing I did differently this time is I tried to fully document the code as I was doing it. It's a good habit to encourage, so I'll make myself do it even though for most of this stuff I'll be the only person to see it. Still, the code could certainly use some tidying up, and some optimizations here and there. I'll take a look at it later.

With regards to what's coming next, I've been talking with somebody about moving on to Scrabble. That would be WAY more complicated, however, and I might want to do something a little lighter for the moment. My wired Xbox controller should be here soon, so I'll get to work a little more with XNA. I'm looking forward to that.

Source:
Solvl.cs
Solvl.Designer.cs
Solvl.resx