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Simulating the NYT Spelling Bee
- shaandsingh 3y agoA fun project I worked on over the last few days this Thanksgiving. For those who love or hate or love to hate the NYT Spelling Bee.
- allears 3y agoI wrote a much simpler Python app to do the same thing. I downloaded a word list that I found (over 400K words) and simply ran through the list, selecting the words that used the appropriate letters, and highlighting the pangram(s). I used the set functions in Python, and it scans the entire word list in just a few seconds. The only drawback is that this enormous word list contains quite a few archaic or otherwise obscure words, so it routinely comes up with 200+ results, many of which aren't really part of a modern vocabulary. Still, it's easy to pick out the more common words.
- shaandsingh 3y agoNice! An interesting issue I ran into here was which dictionary to use. There are a lot of word lists out there, and I didn't know about this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_(Unix) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Words_(Unix). Regarding the project itself, my approach here wasn't to solve the puzzle in the simplest computational way. This would definitely be overkill if that was the goal. The idea was simulating different ways humans think.