halldorel / netskrafl

Icelandic Scrabble(tm) website

Netskrafl - an Icelandic crossword game website

English summary

This repository contains the implementation of an Icelandic crossword game inspired by SCRABBLE(tm). The game is accessible on the web at http://netskrafl.is and http://netskrafl.appspot.com

The game backend is implemented in Python 2.7 for Google AppEngine but the core code is also compatible with Python 3.x and PyPy.

The frontend is a tablet- and smartphone-friendly web client in HTML5 and JavaScript connecting via Ajax to a Flask-based web server on the backend.

The game contains a robot crossword player written in Python. The algorithm is based on Appel & Jacobson's classic paper "The World's Fastest Scrabble Program". At maximum strength level, the robot always plays the highest-scoring move possible but additional and alternative strategies can be plugged in relatively easily. At the lowest strength level, the robot is limited to a set of common words, about a quarter of the size of the entire word database.

The software has a range of features such as immediate tile-by-tile feedback on word validity and score, real-time synchronized games with clocks, Elo scoring of players, an online chat window, and the ability to view player track records.

The game uses a word database encoded in a Directed Acyclic Word Graph (DAWG). For Icelandic, the graph contains almost 2.3 million word forms. Further information about the DAWG implementation can be found in README.md in the Skrafl repository on GitHub.

The game mechanics are mostly found in skraflmechanics.py.

The robot player is implemented in skraflplayer.py.

The DAWG navigation code is in dawgdictionary.py.

Particulars to the Icelandic language are found in languages.py.

The main Flask web server is in netskrafl.py.

The Game and User classes are found in skraflgame.py.

The persistence layer, using the schemaless App Engine NDB database, is in skrafldb.py.

The client JavaScript code is in static/netskrafl.js.

The various Flask HTML templates are found in templates/*.html.

The word database is in resources/ordalisti.text.dawg.

SCRABBLE is a registered trademark. This software or its author are in no way affiliated with or endorsed by the owners or licensees of the SCRABBLE trademark.

Author

Vilhjalmur Thorsteinsson