Astrid is a solver for the currently popular Facebook Messenger game "WordBlitz". Astrid generates solutions for WordBlitz provided with sixteen letters that match the same arrangement of the WordBlitz puzzle.

Possible words are generated by using each letter as a starting point and then traversing the grid of letters by moving to the next adjacent letter. After each move, the total letters traversed thus far are checked against an English lexis in order to determine if the current collection of letters makes a valid word or not.

Simply type go build in the root directory of the project. This will create a binary called astrid.

After building, type ./astrid to execute the solver. You will be presented with a prompt where you must type sixteen letters that represent the WordBlitz puzzle. Type the letters as the appear in WordBlitz row by row from top to bottom. After typing press enter.

Astrid should output 16 columns of text with each column headed by the rank of the letter as it appeared in the original puzzle. Each column consists of the possible words that can be formed starting from that letter.

If the letter grid is like the image below; the input would be "abcdefghijklmnop"

If the word test is typed the letters used will be the first 16 letters of the English alphabet.

At startup Astrid loads a configuration file (config.conf) which contains some options that can be modified. A description of the options along with their default values are in the table below.

The default options should be fine on most systems. If your display is small and/or does not support coloured text, adjust values of maxWordsPerRow, wordColumnsPerRow and enableHighlighting respectively.

The data structure used to store the lexis is a Trie. While this is a fairly efficient data structure for the words, a more space-efficient structure such as a radix trie can be used. Such an implementation change should be trivial since the code is quite loosely coupled. So feel free to make this change yourself if necessary. Otherwise I'll get to it sometime later when I have more time :-).

Finally, Astrid is not perfect because the list of what constitutes valid words for a language is subjective and always-changing. Because of this, not all solution words output by Astrid will be found in a WordBlitz puzzle. If you have a more correct lexis you can point Astrid to it using the lexisFilePath configuration option.

Last Modified Tue 19 Feb 10:05:35 GMT 2019