Tag Archives: puzzle

Wordbrain solver – letter permutations


The program uses a library for permutations:

Norwegian dictionary as Python dict format: wordDict.txt

Terminal output:

Wordbrain Solver – 5×5 – Brute-Force with filtering v.2

Second attempt for this. The previous 5×5 code was estimated to use 12.5 days to get all possible words. Going through the code, I found some weak spots:

  • No control of word length. The program was traversing through words of lengths up to 25. This means extremely long paths with extremely many different variations. Reduced this to maximum traversing 9 letter words.
  • Checking all possible paths, even some that was unnecessary. I made a new dictionary containing all existing first-and-last letters  in a Norwegian dictionary. This way, instead of checking all possible paths between example ‘z’ to ‘ø’, I can skip all these paths immediately, as no words starts and ends with these letters. This would skip 1/600th of the total time.

This reduced the solution time from 22500 minutes to around 7 minutes (!!!). The 4×4 puzzles was also reduced from 10 minutes to 40 seconds.

Implementations for next version:

  • Create a wordlist for all two-first and two-last characters existing from Norwegian dictionary words. This will skip even more unnecessary paths for finding words.
  • Add a filter for the words lengths necessary, the puzzles will show example three-letter, five-letter and nine-letter word.
  • Move all found words to separate dicts and make a function that deletes all words containing one letter, in cases when a word found contains the last letter of one type. This is a quick way to “thin out” the possible words.

Terminal output: