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.
