It’s very difficult to choose the good category for a puzzle, because there will always be people who find the puzzle too easy and other who find the puzzle too hard.
To solve this puzzle, you just need to be rigorous with loops and conditions. You don’t need to code an algorithm like BFS or DFS, you don’t need any memoization, you don’t need to find a theorem, you don’t need to optimize with a O(1) or O(log N) solution instead of O(N) or O(N²) … That’s why I didn’t put this puzzle in medium category.
Admittedly, you can’t solve it in 15 minutes with only one for loop … but this is not a clash, it is an easy puzzle
In test number 7 there is a mistake for word TESTS. First row of the board and score tiles are:
“.TESTS.”
“W…L…W”
Each letter is 1 point basic, so that should give 7 points total, but validator expects 5.
Edit: I didn’t read carefully enough that multipliers work only with tiles that I put and now with tiles to which I connect.
As for the difficulty - while I can agree that concepts needed to solve this puzzle are definitely within the reach of easy, complexity of the solution is not easy for sure. If you can’t solve it step by step (using human understanding) and need to optimize then it’s not an easy puzzle.
What do you mean with optimize in the context of this puzzle? I was not aware needing to optimize for solving this.
And for me it felt like solving it with human understanding; I used to play Scrabble a lot as a child, and the same rules are perfectly followed, so it felt like a matter of logically (‘human understanding’?) implementing those rules I was familiar with.
Hi, my code is working fine for all test cases and validators except for Validator 7 - Count the 2 words. Test Case 7 is working fine. Is there any way for me to check where I am going wrong?
Thank you so much. Turns out it was a stupid error on my part. One of my variables was not taking values that would check the top edge of the board. Seems like none of the test cases have words that touch the top edge.
On an unrelated note, I did not see a test case with duplicate words. For example:
Old Board -
while i did others, i have some problems with 11th validator. i checked with ‘print’, in every other one the validators count scores of symbols, but in the 11th it just adds +1 for each symbol when it definetly shouldn’t work like that.
The 11th validator works like the 11th test, excepted that the blank tile is put on the top right corner (instead of bottom right in the test), and the word is vertical.
The corner is a triple-word score, and the score of the letters already on the board is sometimes 1 sometimes more.
Hello Remi, thanks for this great puzzle !
I’m almost there, I pass all the tests and all the validators except validator 9.
I guess it is a similar case as test 9, but looking at my code, I can’t find any mistake.
Any hint about validator 9 would be really appreciated thank you !
No matter how hard I look, I don’t see any difference between test 9 and validator 9. They are not the same words but in both cases you have to complete a previous word, with new tiles that also fall on special cells.
You’ll receive the test case in private, I’d like you to explain here what the mistake was, when you find it. It can help other players (and maybe I’ll add other test cases if they are not complete).
Thanks for the test case. I’ve been able to identify and fix the error : I was using a function of the language where order of elements is not guaranteed, and so possibly shuffling the letters of a word on the board. For some reasons, it only happens with validator 9.
So your test cases are comprehensive, nothing wrong with them Thanks again!
thank you !