Boggle Solver

Boggle Solver

Boggle is a word game where players race to find words hidden in a 4x4 grid of letters. From this site you can enter a Boggle board and see the resulting solutions. The results are stored in a database.

To display a particular board, visit EnterBoard.aspx?BoardID=boardID&Length=length, where boardID is the list of tiles in the Boggle board and length is the minimum number of letters that must appear in a word to be considered a solution. To get the solutions in JSON, visit Solver.svc?BoardID=boardID&Length=length.

For example, if you want to find all solutions with four or more letters using the board:

r e i b
t m f w
i r a e
r h s t        
    

Simply visit EnterBoard.aspx?BoardID=reibtmfwiraerhst&Length=4 to see the solutions. To get the solutions in JSON, visit Solver.svc?BoardID=reibtmfwiraerhst&Length=4

How It Works

The Boggle Solver loads in a dictionary of words from a text file into a hashtable structure. The hashtable uses the first n letters of the word as the key, where n is the minimum length of a word to consider. At each hashtable bucket I store the list of strings that start with those n letters.

The solutions are found by starting at each of the 16 tiles and then recursively examining the board for solutions. Because the same solution may be arrived at through different paths, duplicate solutions are ignored.

For more information on this application, see my article: Creating an Online Boggle Solver.