This rust program produces a binary which solves the NYT Letter Boxed puzzle game.
- Make sure you have the Rust programing language installed
- Clone this repo to a location on your computer:
git clone https://github.com/natemcintosh/letter_box.git - Build in release mode:
cargo build --release - Run the produced binary asking for help to see all options:
./target/release/letter_box -h - Run the binary on the puzzle inputs for the day, e.g.:
./target/release/letter_box "abc def ghi jkl"
- Create an array of the sides of the box in
create_sides(). The keys are integers from 1 to 4. The values are HashSets of the characters on that side. - Read in a file of valid words. A file of words from the American English Dictionary is included.
- Determine which words from the list can actually fit into the box by filtering the list with the
word_is_valid()function. - With
valid_permutations(), iterate through all of the per 5569 mutations (default is length 2 permutations, but can be changed with the-nargument when calling the binary) of valid words.- Filter out any that cannot be joined, i.e. the last letter of one word is not the first letter of the next.
- Filter out any permutations where all of the letters in the box are not used
- The remaining permutations are valid solutions to the puzzle. Print them out