I would think that "all letter arrangements of length N" would not be what you'd want to use for Boggle, because there are a ton of them and if you start with "q" and go to "qz", there is no point in looking up all possible Boggle sequences on the board in your dictionary to see if any of these "qz*" things are words.

Spelling dictionaries are often stored in a trie which is like a big nested hash (but more efficient) where you feed in the letters of your potential word one at a time and can see when you've reached the point where no word starts with those letters.

So I'd recurse over the board and over the trie in parallel, having the trie tell me when to move on (and when I've found a word).

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.