Octans
Octans is a program to solve Algot's Wordplay (Wordsearch) puzzles
Table of Contents
| Website | https://andinus.nand.sh/octans |
| Source | https://git.tilde.institute/andinus/octans |
| GitHub (mirror) | https://github.com/andinus/octans |
Demo
This was recorded with asciinema.
- Octans v0.2.3: Visualized Output
- Octans v0.1.0 - finds 10 solutions to a puzzle: https://asciinema.org/a/385598
- Octans v0.1.0: https://asciinema.org/a/385500
- Octans 2021-01-14: https://asciinema.org/a/384464
- alt-link (download): https://andinus.nand.sh/static/octans
Installation
Octans is released to CPAN, you can get it from there or install it from
source. In any case, zef is required to install the distribution.
You can run Octans without zef. Just run raku -Ilib bin/octans from
within the source directory.
- Note: Octans requires
WWWmodule. You can however chose to not install it if you wish to run it locally. Checkout thewithout-wwwbranch.
Release
- Run
zef install octans.
Octans should be installed, try running octans --version to confirm.
From Source
You can either download the release archive generated by cgit/GitHub or
clone the project if you have git installed.
Without git
- Download the release:
- Extract the file.
- Run
zef install .in source directory.
With git
All commits will be signed by my PGP Key.
# Clone the project. git clone https://git.tilde.institute/andinus/octans cd octans # Install octans. zef install .
Documentation
Implementation
Initially it went over the list of words & checked if they exist in the grid. This was very slow.
Currently it walks the grid & checks if the current string exist in the dictionary. This is faster for these reasons:
- The dictionary is sorted, we perform binary range search on the dictionary to return the list of all words that start with specific string.
- Starting positions are limited.
If the dictionary wasn't sorted then this probably would've been slower than previous implementation.
The neighbors subroutine (lib/Octans/Neighbors.rakumod) was taken from
my AoC (Advent of Code) 2020's day-11 solution.
Options
dict
Octans's default dictionary file is /usr/share/dict/words, use --dict
flag to change the dictionary. The words in dictionary must be seperated
by a newline (\n) & sorted alphabetically.
visualize
Generates a video solution for the puzzle.
length
Minimum word length to look for. Default is 7.
path
The path to be passed must be a readable file or an url in either format:
- Link when you view it from your local instance: https://tilde.zone/web/statuses/105531207939242077
- Link from Algot's profile: https://mastodon.art/@Algot/105333136907848390
verbose
This will increase verbosity.
News
v0.2.3 - 2022-01-12
Add visualize option.
--visualizenow generates a video solution for the puzzle using Cairo and ffmpeg.
v0.2.0 - 2021-03-04
Removed
sampleoption--samplewill not solve the sample puzzle.Removed shorthand for verbose option
-vwon't work inv0.2.0.Change representation of visited squares
When
--verbosewas passed, it would print the solved puzzle with visited squares replaced with fancy characters. Now it marks them by adding:*to visited + gray squares (start positions)/to visited squares
Removed time taken
Time taken won't be printed anymore.
It was misleading because the time printed was not the time taken to find that specific word, it was the time taken to find all the words upto that word. It would reset for each starting position.
v0.1.4 - 2021-02-19
Fixed the puzzle parsing regex
The older regex fails to parse this puzzle: https://mastodon.art/@Algot/105690195742318751.
v0.1.3 - 2021-01-24
- Added an option to specify minimum word length.
v0.1.2 - 2021-01-20
- Input puzzle can now be of any size & not restricted to 4x4 grid.
v0.1.1 - 2021-01-20
- Read puzzle from a file.
v0.1.0 - 2021-01-19
- Improved performance by using a better algorithm to find words in the grid.