Banished From Boggle
There’s a Facebook app called “Bogglific.” It’s sort of the Boggle equivalent to Scrabulous. Anyway, my boss Gillian likes playing it, so I added it to play against her. And she beat me handily. So handily, in fact, that I was resolute to come up with a way to have my revenge.
I’m the kind of person who likes to play smart, not hard. And I’m a programmer. So put one and one together. Go ahead, I’ll give you some time to predict what I did.
YES, I WROTE A PROGRAM TO CHEAT AT BOGGLE!
I mean, it’s sort of this fun problem if you think about it. My solution used a lot of recursion (probably too much), and a dictionary function that verified actual words.
And it worked pretty well, too. I beat one of my coworkers 70 points to 1. Of course, afterwards I fully disclosed this information. I’d never be able to live up to the hype if someone challenged me to a live game anyway. I mostly cheated to see if my program was any good. And apparently it was. My plan was to make it to the top of the leaderboard, then retire from the business altogether.
I have to hand it to the Bogglific people; they’re pretty clever. They detected that I was cheating and banned me. And I have nothing against that. I knew what I was getting wrapped up in. I still even have my pride intact, since it was my program that I was cheating with! I understand though that cheaters should be banned. It really isn’t fair for everyone else who comes up with their three and four letter words.
I’m thinking of adapting my Boggle solver into a Facebook app. For educational purposes only, of course. Like, check out all the words you missed! It’ll be a sort of Boggle trainer…
Anyway, I am taking my Boggle banishment in stride. I hold nothing against my oppressors. At least now I’ll have some free time to work on my Scrabulous Solver (which is actually a somewhat more computationally complex (and interesting) problem…).