tobyoxborrow / descramble

Scramble game solver

Descramble

Introduction

Solver for "scramble", a facebook game or something from ~2009, I don't quite remember. The game presents a 4x4 grid of characters and the player must find words contained within that are made up of any connecting characters.

I created this to teach myself C and to beat my wife at the game. This is the first full program I've written in C, but should be good code, at least it does what it set out to do.

Wordlists

The program requires wordlists. They should be named words.NUM where NUM is a length from 3 though 8.

You can generate the necessary wordlists from your local dictionary using something like:

% for i in $(seq 3 8); do awk "length(\$0) == $i {print}" /usr/share/dict/words > words.$i; done

Usage

Assuming the game provides the grid:

a  b  c  d
e  f  g  h
i  j  k  l
m  n  o  p

Type out the grid as four blocks of four letters:

% ./descramble abcd efgh ijkl mnop
      fab      fie      fin     fink     fino     glop      ink      jin
     jink    knife     knop     koji      kop      lop     mink      nim
      pol    plonk
Found 18 words

Installation

To compile the program:

% cd /path/to/descramble.c
% make

Copy the file to somewhere like /usr/local/bin or just leave it where it is.