“Boggle / Joggle Solver”

As you may know, I'm an avid fan of the board game "Big Boggle," and its online equivalent, Joggle.

Yesterday, as a sort of "play-to-learn" exercise, I wrote a solver. It's a command-line program written in perl. Start it up, and it loads the dictionary (120,000+ words) and then asks for the letters in the board, which you can either type or paste in. Then it asks for a minimum word length (default is 4). As soon as you press return, the solution appears: all the words that can be found on the board, in neat columns. It's virtually instantaneous on my G4/450 (less than a second).

Then it asks for the next board.

It's not useful when playing the game... you have to type in the letters (there's nothing to copy-and-paste from the joggle board). Worse than the typing, though, is reading the list and then trying to find the words on the board.

It is useful for reviewing boards to see how you could have done better. It's also a humbling experience, as there are an awful lot of words we just don't know.

No, boggle / joggle solvers are nothing new. I didn't write it to come up with something original, I wrote it to learn how to do a couple of things, and to see how efficient my algorithm would be. (Should I post the solver code here? Does anybody care?)

Shoot. As I wrote this journal entry, I looked to see if I could find another boggle solver to point to. That one is written in pure C, but he used almost exactly the same algorithm I used in perl! In fact, they're so much alike it's a little disturbing. (My perl solver blows his first C-based solver away, but the one that uses the same algorithm is way faster than mine simply because he's doing the same thing but with a lot less overhead.)

With that said, I'll finish with a quote from that solver's web page. Some of you may immediately know why I'm quoting this particular section. ;-)

And remember, kiddies: a CS education gives you power.