I decided to try Zynga’s newest word game, Scramble with Friends. It was more addictive than I thought it would be. Of course my mind immediately went to figuring out how to win every time (aka cheating!). After some thought and hunting around the internets, I came up with an algorithm to find all the top words. But since Scramble with Friends is a timed game, it needed to be fast, and it needed to be user friendly. Check out what I came up with. It’s still getting better as time permits. The graphics need some work!
Holy cow, this thing is amazing! I am so glad there are really smart people who figure this stuff out!
Can you give any insight into your algorithm? I was playing around with this and solved it with a recursive algorithm which starts 16 threads (one for each starting position), and recurses through all possible paths until it hits a path that has no partial matches to my dictionary. It then returns back down the stack and tries another path. While this solution works, it is far too slow. This could be the result of my sqlite database, which I plan to switch to an in-memory data structure.
I obviously am not looking for your exact algorithm, but if you have any algorithms you can suggest me looking at I’d greatly appreciate it!
Hi Alex.
I’m going to put my professor hat on here. I don’t like to solve someone else’s problem and deprive them of the joy when solving it alone. I will give you two pieces of advice.
1) Take a close look at your algorithm and see if you can identify the slow parts. Then see if you can find ways to speed it up. (I know, it seems like generic advice, but you really do need to dissect it).
2) You can often make a choice to increase speed by increasing memory usage. See if there are opportunities there.
If you would like to discuss the details of your algorithm or share your code to help with discussion, you can use the contact form at the bottom right of my page to start chatting via email. I’d be happy to chat more.
good luck!
Michael
Scramble with Friends Words Solver Completed
It spent me 4 days to complete this Scramble with Friends Words Finder / Solver. Now support with Mobile, Android, iOS, iPhone, iPad. All the code is using HTML with faster loading time. You no need to install Apps into your Mobile phone, you can just open browser in your mobile phone to access here.
http://www.justin.my/scramble-with-friends-words/
What loser/idiot cares more about winning than using his or her brain to find words? You remind me of the (always) male whiners who get pissed when I beat them time after time using no cheats.