Sunday, January 20, 2013

Ruzzle Solver

So today, my friend challenged to a game called "Ruzzle."  He claimed that it was a new popular game that everyone was playing.  I've never heard of it, so I decided to check it out.

It turns out it's just a relabeled Scramble with Friends, which was popular around a year ago.  I find it quite funny that a game can resurface like this, just under a new name.  There's no new content, except for advertisements.

Around a year ago, when my friend first introduced me to Scramble with Friends, it was sort of fun, but I figured out something very important: I suck at the game!  So, I did as any normal person would do.  I got sick and tired of always losing to my friend.  I decided to go for the fame and the glory.  I made a bot.

Now, I decided to write a blog post (which I haven't done in quite some time) because I uploaded it to MediaFire, where I store all my uploaded files.  Since I'm slightly OCD about this, I want everything on MediaFire to be linked with something on this blog.  (And perhaps because I wanted to share this awesome secret with other people, although I'm sure that there are other Ruzzle solvers out there.)

Anyway, what this program does is find all of the words in the puzzle and output them, sorted from highest to lowest in letter count.  It doesn't take into account the "Double Word Score" or "Triple Letter Score" bonuses, but I imagine if you just type the longest words, they'll contain most of these bonuses anyway.  And they are huge freakin' words so they'll still give you massive points, right?

Most of my released programs are pretty "refined," or at least look like they are finished and and don't have random buttons and stuff lying around, but I decided to just leave this one in it's current state.  Needless to say, don't press the buttons that have weird names -- even I'm not sure what they do anymore.

To use this is extremely simple:
  1. Type the letters on each line into the only TextBox without spaces, so just go from left to right, and then from top to bottom, as the prompt suggests.  There should be 16 letters in the TextBox when you're done, and nothing else.
  2. Press "Go!!!" and a Notepad (or whatever your default text editor is) should pop up, containing the aforementioned list of words.
  3. Input them into the game as fast as you can.
  4. Win games.
UPDATE:  For some reason or another, I recently updated it to have three output options (you can check any or all of them).  The link at the bottom is also updated.
  • Sort:  outputs the sorted list, as it used to
  • Tile: outputs the words for each tile as a starting location, starting with the top-left one, going across and then down.  Each sub-list is sorted on word length.
  • Filter (5+):  same as "Tile" except that it only includes words that are 5 letters or longer to reduce the clutter when going down the list, since there's no way to input all the words in only two minutes.
Now, while I didn't release any source code because it is so messy I'd be embarrassed if anyone saw it, there is one very small customization that you can do.  The program uses a dictionary, or rather, list of words that it searches for during run-time.  It's possible for you to swap out word lists by just copying a new one into the same directory as the executable, and naming it "DICT.txt".  One thing to keep in mind, though, is that I do not know what the Ruzzle word list actually is, so an oversimplified word list will not get you all of the massive points, and an over-complicated word will probably give you words that Ruzzle will not accept.  Maybe you can find the official word list, but I'm too lazy to find it right now.

Have fun beating all your friends at Ruzzle.  It's easy to trick them into thinking you're a pro at this game!  I've done it twice now!

Just follow the link to download the file.  Extract it and run the executable.  It's easy as that!

4 comments:

  1. Wooow. Thanks to this scramble with friends solver. It worked for me. Guess, winning streaks is unstoppable :D. Keep on posting. Love following your post

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  2. Yup, the one you linked is a bit more sophisticated than mine -- it can handle the multiplier tiles. Glad you enjoyed :)

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  3. My two favorites are Scramble with Friends and Ruzzle. They're both the same concept. You're given two minutes to make as many words as you can from a board of scrambled letters. Scramble with Friends gives you "power ups" that you can select to help you out. Ruzzle is a bit more hardcore and doesn't do that -- and Ruzzle is a bit harder, I'm pretty sure. Also try scramble with friends solver

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  4. Yeah, it is very interesting how these games are literally the same thing, only rebranded and relabeled as a new game. And they become popular / fall out of fashion just as quickly. They're both copies of Boggle, I think.

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