DeScramble – An Introduction
This summer I was introduced to a game on Facebook called Scramble. Essentially it’s Boggle but played in a web browser. I was immediately hooked on this game and started playing it regularly. One day as I was playing the game and wondered if I could write a program that could automate my playing this game. Surely software could play this game WAY more efficiently and accurately than I could right?
So I opened up my trusty IDE and started plugging away at trying to make a program smart enough to play Scramble better than I could. Seems like it should be easy enough with the bar set so low.
About a day later I had a very basic Scramble solver which could take a string of letters as input and then spit out a list of possible answers. While there some interesting things about writing a basic Scramble solver (these are very simple to make), I wanted something a little more automated. I also wanted something that didn’t just flat out cheat and win but would act more human to be less noticeable. About a week later I had it finished, my automated Scramble application affectionately called DeScramble.
It was a pretty fun summer project and I plan on spending the next several blog posts talking about the way it works and some of the things I learned as well as some of the challenges. I am also going to try and put together a video so everyone can see it in action.
So stay tuned.
