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Boggler

Live Demo Game

http://jonyoder.github.io

Notes

This is a simple Boggle solver that supports a 4x4 to 6x6 Boggle grid (to simulate Boggle, Big Boggle, and Super Big Boggle). The application's boilerplate code is based on a example from the Redux project, and is written in ES2015/ES6 and transcompiled by Babel. The dictionary is included in 'words.js'. No server-side code is required.

The application includes the redux-devtools project, which displays a docked tool window to the right of the application. You can use this tool to monitor the current Redux applications state. Of particular interest is the state.data object.

If you open the Chrome developer console, you'll see that the application logs the milliseconds to solve each puzzle.

The application solves the Boggle board as follows:

  • Using the view data, a "graph" (Map of Maps) is created to support fast recursive lookups of letter sequences
  • Using the graph, we simply iterate the dictionary entries and look for matches

The following source files are probably of most interest:

  • words.js (the dictionary; copied from /usr/share/dict/words)
  • js/actions/index.js (see the 'playGame' method)
  • js/utils/boggle.js (builds a Map of Maps for easy recursion to solve a puzzle)
  • js/views/PlayView.js (the game view)

Known issues

There are a number of relatively easy improvements that would be nice to add to this app.

  • Enforce character selection to alpha characters only
  • Enforce character select to the actual dice values included with Boggle
  • Treat the character 'Q' as 'Qu' to more closely simulate a real Boggle game
  • Invalidate results when the game board is changed
  • Upon selecting a result, highlight the word in the board above
  • Provide a "New Game" link to randomize the board (you can currently switch to the home page and back to accomplish this)
  • Provide a better binding between ReactJS and the game board (the current implementation is hackish)
  • Provide a better dictionary that includes plurals and other variations
  • Testing: Unit tests (especially for the solver logic) should be added
  • Efficiency improvements
    • Multi-threaded server-side solver
    • Dictionary indexing to support solving multiple words at once (for example, the words "artifact", "art", "fact", "act" could all be solved in a single recursion

Thanks to