There are two parts to this.

1) Find all unique sets of letters given an input of letters and wildcards
2) Calculate the number of words for each unique set

The maximum possible number of letter sets is 26**wildcards, which means that you can comfortably fit all the letter sets in memory up to 4 wildcards. Scrabble only has 2 blanks, so this isn't a problem. Calculating the number of words possible from each set is a simple factorial / letter count operation. The following is a rough but workable solution, which you can edit as necessary for various letter / wildcard combinations. 

use strict;
use warnings;

my $letters = 'ABCDEF??';

my $length = length($letters);

## We'll be using factorials a lot, so it's best to pre-calculate
my @factorial = (0,1);
$factorial[$_] = $factorial[$_-1] * $_ for 2..$length;

my ($blanks, @lsets, $lset, $nlset, $words, $twords);

## Find the number of blanks
while ($letters =~ /[^A-Z]/) {
    $letters =~ s/[^A-Z]//;
    $blanks++;
}

## Produce unique letter sets, given blanks
@lsets = ($letters);
while ($blanks--) {
    my %lsets;
    for $lset (@lsets) {
        for ('A'..'Z') {
            $nlset = join '', sort split //, $lset.$_;
            $lsets{$nlset} = ();
        }
    }
    @lsets = keys %lsets;
}

## Calculate the number of words possible from each letter set
for (@lsets) {
    $words = $factorial[$length];
    my %lcount;
    $lcount{$_}++ for split //, $_;
    for (keys %lcount) {
        $words /= $factorial[$lcount{$_}] if $lcount{$_} > 1;
    }
    $twords += $words;
}

print $twords;

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In reply to Re: Scrabble word arrangements with blank tiles by TedPride
in thread Scrabble word arrangements with blank tiles by Anonymous Monk

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