Kool problem

[MihaiG]

well i saw this problem cant fin liunk again but it went soemthign like this...

Find the largest possible box of letters than in every horizontal/vertical direction makes a legal english word....

seems preaty hard...you woudl need to make somethign that could access a database for words etc. any suggestions

[[Gandalf]]

Try it out using paper first, with three letter words, then four, etc...

The problem I see with this kind of problem is that you would need a large database of pretty much all english words. If you have that, then it would take a long time to sort, or do anything with that huge list.

[Tony]

I'm sure that there are a lot of tricks to this problem. Writing a crossword generator might be a good first step to understanding the complex problems that could appear in this larger, more restrictive case.

You know how most crosswords have those 4x4 boxes in their corners (usually).. Getting that is a start.

Another problem is simply having enough words of the right length. 10x10 box = 20 ten letter words. Now think larger

[Delos]

Whoosh. Nobody knows what just happened.

[mod:3be0dfdb40="Delos"]
Hmm...editting my posts eh? I'll remember this one Tony.
[/mod:3be0dfdb40]

[zylum]

i managed to get a solution (in turing) to give 7x7 solutions in a reasonable amount of time. the first one is generated in 12 seconds on a 733MHz celeron. from what ive read, the largest box was 9x9 so im not too far off... the word list i used is attached.

i will post my solution later on, i just want to see if anyone else can achieve a better result than me

[Mazer]

...

zylum, what rules did you use for a "legal" English word?

[Hikaru79]

Dictionary.com wrote:

zyz·zy·va P Pronunciation Key (zz-v)
n.
Any of various tropical American weevils of the genus Zyzzyva, often destructive to plants.

Oh my god, you weren't making it up, it actually is a real word

[Mazer]

I can't say I'm not surprised by that, but my main concern was "aarrghh"

[zylum]

aarrghh is a legal word.. google it. the wordlist i use is the enable2k wordlist and it has all the legal scrabble words and all that garbage. you can also find it with a google search.

has anyone got any solutions yet???

im converting mine into java at the moment and adding a few more features that should speed it up a bit... maybe ill be able to get to 8x8 or even 9x9...

[Tony]

are all the words used supposed to be unique?

[zylum]

no... if they are not unique its considered a regular word square where as if all column words do not match the corrisponding row words, then it's considered a double word square.

[[Gandalf]]

Tony covering his tracks. I don't think it was quite like this:

Quote:

Another problem is simply having enough words of the right length. 10x10 box = 20 ten letter words. Now think larger

The thing about these words is that a lot of them are random names and places....

[zylum]

the people who are trying to find the first 10x10 word square are using even larger and more obscure wordlists than i am .

[Tony]

zylum wrote:

are using even larger and more obscure wordlists than i am .

Where would I get a hold of such a wordlist?

[zylum]

http://ibiblio.org/pub/Linux/libs/yawl-0.3.2.tar.gz

if you can convert it into a txt for windows, i would appreciate it... this list contains 264000+ words. the current word list i am using is 173000+