Boggle project update

Update on the Boggle Project of Doom...



Got home from work and eagerly started coding... downloaded TP 5.5 from Borland's website... I'm pretty sure I have a copy of BP 7.0 somewhere, but I have no idea where. Anyway, started busting out the code, and hit a few glitches along the way, but nothing that can't be overcome. The biggest one was that I had tried coding the the dice as a 16X6 array, but that turned out to be too tedious for my short attention span, so I switched over to a 16x1 array of 6-letter "words".

Figured out a way to eliminate the "duplicate letters on dice" problem, now the only problem is having to figure out how to get a die removed from the queue once it has been used. Ah, our old friend recursion. I've taken a break from flowcharting and pseudocoding to update the blog, and while roaming the Web for hints, stumbled across a site which is a variation of my project... apparently Boggle is a fun assignment among Computer Science professors! None of the projects listed seemed to go about it with the same goal in mind: finding the longest word possible. Although it appears that theses have been written about this subject, so it's weird that I would come up with it "out of the blue," but also a little intimidating as well.

My goal is to find at least one 17-letter word. I have hope -- one of the documents I scanned was running an algorithm on a 5x5 authentic Boggle board and mentioned a 14-letter word in passing. I jumped to my set and was able to reconstruct the word "PRECONDITIONED" without any of the 9 'extra' dice in the 5x5 version.

Time will tell... back to coding!