CPU: Pentium SU2700 1.3GHz
RAM: 3gb
Loads dictionary of 178,590 words from file into a tree in < 1 second.
Solves 100x100 Boggle (boggle.txt) in 4 seconds. A board that size usually contains ~44,000 words.
Solving a 4x4 Boggle is too fast to provide a meaningful benchmark. :)
The solver uses a custom tree structure. I'm not sure it can be considered a trie but it's similar.
Each node has 26 branches, 1 for each letter of the alphabet.
I traverse the branches of the boggle board in parallel with the branches of my dictionary.
If the branch does not exist in the dictionary, I stop searching it on the Boggle board.
I convert all the letters on the board to ints. So 'A' = 0.
Since it's just arrays, lookup is always O(1).
Each node stores if it completes a word and how many words exist in its children.
The tree is pruned as words are found to reduce repeatedly searching for the same words. I believe pruning is also O(1).
The binaries are compiled in Debian 64bit.
boggle_generator -> Generates the boggle puzzle. Optionally specify a puzzle width (4, 100, etc) when running from the command line.
boggle_solver -> Run this after generating a puzzle. The found words will be saved to results.txt.
When compiling with G++ use the -O3 optimization flag for maximum performance!
Earlier versions used Google's Sparse Hash. The trie implementation is 1.3x faster. The dictionary loading is also faster.
I found that the solver slows down as the puzzle size increases. It doesn't just take more time overall, the time required per node in the depth-first-search actually increases. I'm not sure if it's a bug in my code, a hardware limitation, or the nature of this problem. If you have an idea why I'd love to hear it! -> machineboy2045@gmail.com