Ezra and I took 30 minutes this evening and wrote a word find puzzle solver in Python. This uses a little bit of pre-processing, sets, dictionaries, tuples, and other (less efficient) techniques to fairly quickly find the answers.
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| board = ''' | |
| m a i n v f | |
| a n a f d d | |
| s m i t h a | |
| i r o n r v | |
| e m o z a i | |
| a e e t a d | |
| ''' | |
| words = ''' | |
| ezra | |
| david | |
| sam | |
| smith | |
| iron | |
| fire | |
| ''' | |
| # use this to get a dictionary involved. | |
| #words = open('dictionary.txt', 'rt').read() | |
| BOARD = {} | |
| x = 0 | |
| y = 0 | |
| for line in board.strip().split('\n'): | |
| y += 1 | |
| x = 0 | |
| for char in line: | |
| char = char.lower() | |
| if char in 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz': | |
| x += 1 | |
| BOARD[x,y] = char | |
| WORDS = set() | |
| for line in words.strip().split('\n'): | |
| word = line.strip().lower() | |
| if len(word) >= 3: | |
| WORDS.add(word) | |
| DIREC = ( | |
| (0,–1), | |
| (1,–1), | |
| (1,0), | |
| (1,1), | |
| (0,1), | |
| (–1,1), | |
| (–1,0), | |
| (–1,–1), | |
| ) | |
| PREFX = set() | |
| FOUND = set() | |
| for word in WORDS: | |
| prefix = '' | |
| for c in word[:–1]: | |
| prefix += c | |
| PREFX.add(prefix) | |
| # For each position on the board | |
| for x,y in BOARD: | |
| # For each direction of 8 | |
| for xx,yy in DIREC: | |
| x1 = x #cur pos | |
| y1 = y #cur pos | |
| word = '' #cur word | |
| while True: | |
| # Check if off board | |
| if (x1,y1) not in BOARD: | |
| break | |
| # Get character at current pos | |
| word += BOARD[x1,y1] | |
| # If it is a word, add it | |
| if word in WORDS: | |
| FOUND.add(word) | |
| # If this is not a prefix, then bail out | |
| if word not in PREFX: | |
| break | |
| # Increment current position based on direction | |
| x1 += xx | |
| y1 += yy | |
| print(FOUND) |
The Gahooa Perspective 