boggle

have you ever played the game boggle? they give you 7 letters or so adn then you hafta find a set number or words in 2 minutes or so. now, my latin teacher wanted me to make a game like boggle except that it uses latin words. now i have a couple of questions to go about doing this. my first one is how to give the player his/her letters and all the words that could be made, i have 2 ides about this:

1. i could pick 7 random letters and then run through a latin dictionary list for all the possible words that could be made out of the letters that are picked, now im afraid that this way would be too slow

2. the other idea i had would in a file i would have set letters and along with the letter have set words, then the program would choose a random set of these and then you would play with that, now i think the problem with this is just adding all the letters and words for each letters would be tedious

now, i want your opinion on which one i should choose or a whole different idea. i was also planning on doing this in vb cause thats pretty much the only language i know well. i could also use perl but what would i do about user interface? well any ideas are welcome, thanks!

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my first one is how to give the player his/her letters and all the words that could be made, i have 2 ides about this:

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I'd go with idea one... pick 7 random letters and then just link a Latin dictionary to the program and have it scan for that word, if the word doesn't exist, then have it display some kind of message box that the word they entered is incorrect. And I'm about 100% sure it will take no time at all, it'll be just like looking it up in a dictionary program....

= Cheers, jag291 =

Ok, how about this

Starting with each letter on the board in turn,

- find the words that start with that letter
- look at the adjacent letters,
- Find all the words that start with those two letters
- Discard any moves which don't have any word down that path
- Continue to apply the algorithm recursively until you run out of valid moves.
- Each time you discover a path that matches a word, add it to the list of solutions.

It's easy, because you only need to consider the dictionary one letter at a time.

In principle you can have 26 dictionaries for the words that start with certain letters. For each starting square, you only need to look at the words beginning with that letter.

Slarty