Create Word Puzzles in Python — Part 1
Anyone who finds the picture below familiar should know the rules of the game as well: try to find the words buried in the sea of letters. And while I was playing the game, it suddenly hit me that maybe I could create the puzzles by myself.
General Logic
For the first version, I am only hoping the achieve a simplified game, where I randomly add words into empty space of the game grid, i.e. a non-overlapping grid.
An outline for the algorithm:
- Select a random word from dictionary: in this case I am using the list of 3000 most common vocabulary obtained from online
- Randomly choose the insertion style: vertical or horizontal
- Loop through each row and column to find possible places to insert the word
- From result in Step 3, select a starting location (row & column) by random
- Repeat 1–4 until the loop count is greater than specified count
Main program
Here I am using the random sampling method random.choice(seq, k=1) extensively from selection of words to the placement of word in the game grid.
Besides that, the most important part of the algorithm is to search the grid and find possible places for insertion of the new words at each iteration, defined as helper functions.
Helper functions
In both horizontal and vertical cases, I am using a nested for loop for row and column, or column and row respectively for search the grid. Since I am only aiming for a non-overlapping version here, I just check for empty cells and return the possible starting index of empty cells for the insertion of a new word.
Game Generation
Below are some of the game grids generated:
Areas for Improvement
Presented is only the first version, with a lot of areas for improvement. I will implement and update in the next article.
- Allow for overlapping of words like a real word puzzle does
- Insert random alphabets to fill the grid
- Present the list of words that could be found from the game grid
Updated link for Part 2:
Thanks for reading and let me know if you have any questions or comments!
