Challenge #75: Scrabble Word Finder

[Phil_L57]

Solution for the 7 provided letters. Append, append, append...!!

[SeanAdams]

---

@MarqueeCrew wrote:

Congrats @SeanAdams on your new shiny badge!

Climbing to the summit alone however could lead to a dangerous selfie situation.  Hopefully your team will catch you soon.

Cheers,

Mark

---

Thank you Mark! 

I'm eagerly awaiting your 350 solutions milestone - that's the true definition of a peak that will be difficult for anyone else to scale!  @MarqueeCrew

Not too long now until Inspire EU!

[nick_ceneviva]

Attached solution for the simplest case with no blanks

[MinaGO]

Forgot to upload this last week, haven't done the bonus rounds yet. Prepped the letters beforehand (except the casing).

Spoiler

[estherb47]

My approach. Since I wasn't able to jump on this quickly to win the first 75th badge, decided to take my time and work towards developing a Scrabble word app (which will let you include letters already on the board). Not there yet, but almost. Congratulations to everyone, with a special shout out to @SeanAdams, @NicoleJohnson, @LordNeilLord, and so many others who have contributed to our collective success in these challenges!!!!

Took a similar approach to many at the start, and then went a little macro-crazy. Started with cleaning up the word list to include words that are only 7 characters long (since the objective is a high scoring first word). Wrote the output to a yxdb for fastest processing.

Also cleaned up the letters/points/number tiles and wrote that output to a yxdb too.

Here's where I diverge. Then I designed a few macros:

This one generates all possible words from the letters in the hand:

Spoiler

Spoiler:

It's a convoluted iterative macros with cross-joins to generate combinations, and steps to cleanse repeated combinations, and illegal combinations (e.g., if there were 2 a's in the hand, and 3 a's in the combination as a result of the cross joining)

But it works. And I think I finally mostly understand iterative macros.

This one generates point values per word:

Spoiler

Spoiler:

The input is the possible words based on the letters in hand (each word already has a unique record ID). That's parsed into rows. Letters are matched to point values, then summarized per record ID, and output back to the workflow

This one generates possible words, taking into account one or two blank tiles:

Spoiler

Spoiler:

This one takes in words from the word list that didn't match to the exact letters, and every time a letter from the hand matches, it's taken away from the word. If one or two letters are left over after processing, then that word is possible with a wildcard. Multi-row formula is definitely your friend for this kind of approach!

And finally, my workflow that uses all of these macros:

Spoiler

Spoiler:

Hopefully I packaged all of my macros with the workflow. When the app is finished, I'll post it too!

[lminors]

Here’s my solution to the 7 letters. Still working on the nasty bonus blank tiles (probably a project for a rainy day). I wanted to build an iterative macro to deal with it all but there are some seriously nice and simple solutions on here.

[justin_winter]

Guess I'm late to the party, but my first pass worked backward from the words to compare against a bank of letters, find the count and points for each letter, then compared that to a match on the input letters. Very little regex, all formula tool and append. 3.5s runtime. 

[PhilipMannering]

Think I found a reasonably elegant solution using only 16 tools that do all three cases.

Also went further and created an app where you input your own letters (0 or more including repeats) and the number of blanks (with the choice of whether or not blanks have value). See attachment.

[samjohnson]

Not being a RegEx expert I wanted to figure out if I could do this the old-fashioned way: raw inexperience. And I did. This is, to an Alteryx Ace, probably an example of terribly inefficient workflow development. But what the hey? It works and I understand every step.

This doesn't run in sub-1 second times, either, but 1.4 seconds ain't bad.

The most fun was writing the step-by-step, letter-by-letter checks for each word between 2-7 letters long in the "Finding matches based on word length" Tool Container.

Alteryx is quite simply the most fun I've had coding in a long time.

[Ken_Black]

Philip,

That is a beautiful solution. Now, all we have to do is set up a secret data transmission system that can allow us to participate in and win the Scrabble world championships! Of course, I'm kidding because we are not cheaters, but I bet there are plenty of unscrupulous people out there that would love to take the chance. Thanks for sharing this because I really enjoyed the quality of the solution, the awesome documentation, and layout.

Ken