wordsquarefinder

This is a command-line tool for generating word squares and double word squares, as described on Wikipedia. It uses a tree-search algorithm and supports multithreading for optimal efficiency.

Examples:

    size 7              size 8:
(double square):
                    c r a b w i s e
 d e c o l o r      r a t l i n e s
 o p e r a t e      a t l a n t e s
 w i r e t a p      b l a s t e m a
 e t a g e r e      w i n t e r l y
 r o m a n i a      i n t e r t i e
 e m i n e n t      s e e m l i e r
 d e c o d e s      e s s a y e r s

Generated squares are currently limited to the English alphabet (26 letters and no diacritics) only.

The inspiration for this project was the "weekly" mode in FurbyFubar's game Squardle.

Compilation

Download and install Go if you haven't already. Then simply run go build in the project directory to build.

Usage

./wordsquarefinder [args]

Arguments:

• -n: Size of the word squares to generate. Default is 5.
• -t: Number of threads (goroutines) to run. If greater than one, squares are not guaranteed to be returned in alphabetical order! Defaults to half the number of logical CPU cores available. Experiment with different values to see which is most efficient for your system.
• -i: Path to the input word list. Expects one word per line; words that are too long, too short or contain unsupported characters are skipped. The included default list, english_filtered.txt, is based on english3.txt from this website with some offensive words (including some from this list) filtered out. wordle_solutions.txt, a sorted list of all 5-letter Wordle solutions, is also included.
• -s and -e: Defines a range of starting words to search. For example, for n=5, -s crate -e treks will search the following range:

   crate       treks
   aaron       zymes
   aaron  ...  zymes
   aaron       zymes
   aaron       zymes
  

• -p: Pretty-print output, i.e. output words on separate lines. By default, squares are output in comma-separated form for easy CSV parsing.
• -u: Require unique words. This will eliminate squares like the second example above, where corresponding rows/columns have the same word. Note that the rows and columns of any square can be swapped to produce another valid square, so squares with unique words will appear in both configurations.

Each thread searches for squares starting with a particular word. When running, the program displays the first and last starting words currently being searched.

Notice there is no option to specify an output file; instead, pipe output to a file like so:

./wordsquarefinder [args] > output.txt

Log messages are written to stderr and are not included in the output file.