05:43 pm, 22 Jan 07
automated boggle
I showed my friend Dan at work the crossword stuff I've been working on and he busted out his boggle solver, then proceeded to discuss the difficulty of finding the highest-scoring possible board -- even enumerating all possible boards without counting repeats is difficult. Here is the best of one of his previous attempts, at 2338 possible points, but he's since done better.
random memories from the past...
A boggle solver was one of my dad's original programs on our home-made Apple II. And when I mean home-made, I seriously mean home-made... my mom and him together soldered parts for weeks in the evenings while watching TV. Then when it came time to burn the (stolen?) ROM, they had to use discarded ROM chips from work that failed testing because they had bits stuck high or stuck low... so they just had a burn a bunch of Apple II images onto the discarded ROMs until they got one where the stuck bits were in the correct state.Anyway, the boggle solver he wrote took forever to run. But not as long as his sphere-with-one-light-source rendering... on a 1-bit display w/ 4 shades of green (2x2 pixel grids). That thing took days to run and I was pissed that I couldn't use the computer during that time. And when it was done we just looked at it and that was it. No screenshot, no print.
I wonder what's faster... javascript today, or Apple II BASIC then. :-)
boggle solver
That's pretty awesome.oh noes
please tell me the entire thing isn't implemented in phpRe: oh noes
Nope, the PHP just does the rendering. All the heavy lifting is done by a backend written in C.http://www.gtoal.com/wordgames/boggle.html
Do you want to include your source code in the archive?
We've been playing at finding high-scoring grids too...
G