[Community Puzzle] Scrabble score - Puzzle discussion

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 :wink:

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Summary

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?

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Validator 7 sent in private. Please tell us here what was wrong, so that it can help other and/or I can add or modify a test case.

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 -

...S
...I
...N
....

New Board -

...S
...I
...N
SINK

Thank you for this puzzle - it was great fun to solve and a great demonstration of a ‘hard easy’ puzzle.

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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.

thanks for the answer! i realised it was actually my mistake after a break from the puzzle.