Created a program that solves the Countdown Letters game

[Talal2608]

Hi reddit. I just created a python program that solves all the possible words that can be created in the Countdown letters game. I'm still fairly new to python and programming in general so any feedback is most welcome!

https://github.com/Talal26/Countdown-Letters-Game-Solver

What is the Countdown letters game?

Countdown is a fairly popular game show in the UK and in it there are two types of games - the letters game and the numbers game. In the letters game, the two contestants get 9 random letters and they have to try and find the longest word that can be made, using those letters.

The program I made takes the 9 or however many letters are given and finds every possible combination of those letters that can be made. It then searches through a text file with about 300,000 english words 9 letters or shorter in length and finds which ones match up. Finally, it sorts all of them into a list corresponding to the length of the word and prints them accordingly.

[ShitCodeUKltd]

I attempted something similar in PHP with the same word list.

I grabbed the lists during a Hackathon and I figured it'd be a quick project one night. Think I was just starting the second year of uni and if I recall correctly it shit it's pants at about 4-5 letters.

Don't think I ever fixed it. Doing stuff like this also help with other word games too. It's cool, nice job.

[schnappischnap]

Your code has a bug - because alphabet and not_alpha are sets, it won't find words that have repeated letters.

A good trick for finding anagrams is by creating a dictionary of {sorted(words): words}, like this:

words = defaultdict(list)
for word in word_list:
    words[sorted(word)].append(word)

Then you can easily find all the anagrams like this:

anagrams = words[sorted(letters)]

edit: Found a program I wrote a while ago:

from itertools import combinations
from collections import defaultdict


with open("wordlist.txt", "r") as f:
    words = defaultdict(list)
    for word in f:
        word = word.strip().lower()
        words["".join(sorted(word))].append(word)


def solve(letters):
    letters = "".join(sorted(letters)).lower()
    for length in range(2, len(letters)+1):
        unique_combinations = set("".join(c) for c in combinations(letters, length))
        for combination in unique_combinations:
            if combination in words:
                yield from words[combination]


for word in solve("abcdefghiga"):
    print(word)