Amazing Boggle Board

[chrisname]

Oh. Fair enough. I agree with you on smoking; I don't like it (the taste, the smell; I just don't see what the appeal is)...

[Return 0]

lol I don't smoke... I have no idea why that word came up first, but it was worth some hefty points... I don't think I've ever been beaten in Boggle... right up there with Risk, Axis & Allies, Stratego, Chess, and TiddlyWinks!!! lol

[chrisname]

Of those, I've only played Chess (who hasn't?) and Risk. I'm not really that good at chess. I can play, but I don't do well. As for Risk, I played about four times and won two out of those four, against two or so of my friends...

[hamsterman]

I have an idea!
Why don't we make a program that generates even more amazing boggle board
It somehow sounds quite complicated to me. I've never been good at stuff like that though.
Firstly we would need to get a list of common words. Any ideas about where to get one?..

[Return 0]

hamsterman wrote:

Firstly we would need to get a list of common words. Any ideas about where to get one?..

Wouldn't that defeat the purpose of the game? The words are completely random. Each cube has a letter on each face. They are all shook up until they fit neatly in each slot and then you try to find the words.

[hamsterman]

No. I didn't mean to write the game.
It simply seemed like an interesting exercise to write a program that puts as many words into a boggle board as possible.

edit: http://www.paulnoll.com/Books/Clear-English/English-3000-common-words.html here's a bunch of words. I just googled "common word list"... How didn't I think about that earlier

[chrisname]

Firstly we would need to get a list of common words. Any ideas about where to get one?..

Most Unices come with a file, /usr/share/dict/words.

[Disch]

@ Return 0:

Axis & Allies

Hell yes.

Best board game ever.

[Return 0]

@Disch... Good to see someone else has played it! I also just picked up Axis and Allies Battle of the Bulge, which is a 2 player board game... but sadly my wife refuses to play so I have yet to get a match going... I plan on buying A&A D-Day or Guadalcanal as well.

[Disch]

I've only played Classic and the Revised one (with destroyers and artillery added). There's supposedly a 50th anniversary version out now which I was thinking of getting, but I don't really have anyone to play against either =(

But yeah I never played any of the "spinoffs" (if you'd call them that) like Guadalcanal or the like.

If you have the Revised set, I recommend digging up a copy of "AARe" rules and playing by those instead of the out of the box rules. It's like a fan made rule set that adds TONS of interesting stuff and makes the game way cooler. Makes sea combat much more important and makes destroyers actually worth buying (and makes subs really awesome).

I might have a link to the AARe rules somewhere... hang on...

*checks*

Ah yeah I uploaded it to my webspace.

http://disch.arc-nova.org/AAR_LHTR_v2.0.pdf <-- LHTR rules (on which AARe is based)
http://disch.arc-nova.org/AARe.txt <--- AARe rules (awesome). Turn on word wrap!

Even just give the AARe rules a quick skim. It's freaking awesome.

[gcampton]

I played monopoly and MTG when going up, well played MTG into my late 20's....

I still love it but never play it, haven't played it in years. I was desperate for cash one time and sold over $20k worth of cards (all my rares, foils, and beta dual lands) for about $1000.

[hamsterman]

d n a h             t o h r
i r e i             r s t e
m a t s             i a e a
d e l o             w d n l

77 words            82 words

I made an app that generates boggle boards.
The word list is quite small though (1957 words). My app finds only 34 words in the board Duoas posted due to this.
Would anyone be interested in seeing the source? I didn't know how to do this, so I tried a genetic algorithm. It took quite a while for my pc to generate these two...

[chrisname]

We can do ILNIEN ASSUMBLY to make it go more fastly!

Make wordlist bigger.
I have this many words:

$ cat /usr/share/dict/cracklib-small | wc -l
52848

+--------------+-------------------------------+
| Line number  | URL                           |
+--------------+-------------------------------+
| 0-13212      | http://pastebin.com/md44a974  |
+--------------+-------------------------------+
| 13212-26424  | http://pastebin.com/m705d8b36 |
+--------------+-------------------------------+
| 26424-39636  | http://pastebin.com/m34b52902 |
+--------------+-------------------------------+
| 39636-52848  | http://pastebin.com/m1d74eebc |
+--------------+-------------------------------+

Have fun.

[hamsterman]

Thanks!
Now my 77 and 82 turned into 357 and 326
And the one Duoas posted has only 168 words in it

Here they are:

ahem apr aps apt are arpa art arts ash ashen asher ashore asp aster ate enol era eras eta hare harem harp hart has hasp hast haste hasten hem hen her hera hero hers hint hints hip hips hipster hit hits hoe hom home homer homers homo hone honer horn hornet hornets hot inert inter item its lome lone loner loners men menlo met metro mets moe moen mohr monroe mont monte month more morn mort mot motet nero net nets nih nip nips nit omen one ore pain paine paint painter painters paints pat pate paten pater path pats pin pine pint pints pit pith pits pro prom pta rash rasp rent rents ret retain rho roe rome romeo rot rote share sharp she shoe shore shorn short shorten shot spa spain spat spate spin spine spit spite stain stem stern sterno strom tap taps ten tent tenth tents tern thin thine tin tine tip tips toe tom tome tor torah tore torn tort trash trot tsar

It sure is a lot of words... and I know about a half of them...
Also many of them may be proper nouns

[Duthomhas]

abbreviations and incomplete words or word parts:
apr (short for April)
hom- (homo-)
homo- (==same)
pro- (==in favor of; short for professional)
prom (short for promenade)

initialisms:
apr (Annual Percentage Rate)
aps (Advanced Photon Source)
arpa (backronym for Address and Routing Parameter Area)
nih (National Institutes of Health - a government research agency)
pta (Parent-Teacher Association)

proper nouns:
asher (Founder and name of one of the twelve tribes of Israel)
hera (Ancient Greek goddess of women and marriage)
menlo ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo )
mets (A baseball team)
moen (Makers of fine bath furniture)
mohr (a common surname)
monroe (a common surname)
mot ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mot - I had to look this one up)
nero (despot and pervert who ruled Rome 54-68 AD)
rome (city in Italy)
romeo (idiot protagonist in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet)
spain (country in Europe)
sterno (heat in a can http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterno )
strom (given name and surname - I had to look this one up)
torah (the Law, the Prophets, and the Writings - Hebrew scripture)

stuff I had to look up (but is valid):
enol (some funky atom used by the body to process sugars http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?q=enol&afid=5052&s=enol&search= )
motet (a class of choral musical composition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motet )
pater (dad. apparently this is a british word...)
ret (To moisten or soak http://www.answers.com/main/ntquery?q=ret&afid=5052&s=ret&search= )
tor (a class of English rocky hills - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tor )

That's down to 144 words...

The problem with spelling dictionaries is that they don't distinguish things like biographical, etc information, so they are not very helpful with Boggle...

That is very cool!