maxbaird / blitzkrieg

Solver for the Facebook Messenger game Word Blitz

About

Blitzkrieg is a solver for the currently popular Facebook Messenger game "Word Blitz". Blitzkrieg generates solutions for Word Blitz provided with sixteen letters that match the same arrangement of the Word Blitz puzzle.

Possible words are generated by using each letter as a starting point and then traversing the grid of letters by moving to the next adjacent letter. After each move, the total letters traversed thus far are checked against an English lexis in order to determine if the current collection of letters makes a valid word or not.

Compiling

Navigate to the root directory of the project and type make. This should generate the executable file blitzkrieg.out.

Executing

Type ./blitzkrieg.out to execute the solver. You will be presented with a prompt where you must type sixteen letters that represent the Word Blitz puzzle. Type the letters as the appear in Word Blitz row by row from top to bottom. After typing press enter.

Blitzkrieg should output 16 columns of text with each column headed by the rank of the letter as it appeared in the original puzzle. Each column consists of the possible words that can be formed starting from that letter.

If the letter grid is like the image below; the input would be "abcdefghijklmnop"

Commands

If the word test is typed the letters used will be the first 16 letters of the English alphabet.

Configuring

At startup Blitzkrieg loads a configuration file (config.conf) which contains some options that can be modified. A description of the options along with their default values are in the table below.

Option	Description	Default
MAX_WORD_LENGTH	Most letters a word should have	9
MIN_WORD_LENGTH	Least letters a word should have	3
MAX_WORDS_PER_ROW	Number of words shown before repeating column header	15
WORD_COLUMNS_PER_ROW	Number of columns of words to show per row	16
SORT_DESCENDING	Sort words in descending order	True
ENABLE_HIGHLIGHTING	Highlight word columns and words with rare letters	True
HIGHLIGHT_LETTERS	Words containing these letters are highlighted.	xqzjy
LEXIS_FILE_PATH	Path to file with list of words	lexis

The default options should be fine on most systems. If your display is small and/or does not support coloured text, adjust values of MAX_WORDS_PER_ROW, WORD_COLUMNS_PER_ROW and ENABLE_HIGHLIGHTING respectively.

Miscellaneous

The data structure used to store the lexis is a Trie. While this is a fairly efficient data structure for the words, a more space-efficient structure such as a radix trie can be used. Such an implementation change should be trivial since the code is quite loosely coupled. So feel free to make this change yourself if necessary. Otherwise I'll get to it sometime later when I have more time :-).

Last Modified Sun 10 Feb 15:50:23 GMT 2019