beeline

Live web app: https://dylanpyle.github.io/beeline

What?

A tool to find solutions to the New York Times’ Spelling Bee puzzles. The concept is pretty simple; given 6 optional letters and 1 required one, create as many words using only these letters as you can.

Why?

I got pretty into these puzzles during COVID-19 quarantine. After “finishing” one, I was always curious how many solutions I had missed — turns out, usually way more than I expected. I assumed there would be a trivial way to solve them automatically & efficiently, but the more I thought about it the more I realized there probably wasn’t. I haven’t checked out any other solutions/solvers if they exist, this is just my attempt to learn through building.

How?

There are three entry points to the codebase:

• bin/build-lookup-table.ts
  • Ingests data/words and compiles a data structure to make word lookups more efficient; writes this to static/words.lookup.json.
• bin/find-words.ts <optional letters> <required letter>
  • A CLI interface for finding words; e.g. bin/find-words.ts abcdef g
• docs/index.html
  • A web frontend for finding words. Compiled from the contents of src/web.ts and static/.

Tools

• bin/dev - start local dev server, watching for changes
• bin/test [filename] - run one or all tape test suites
• bin/build - compile TS and static assets to docs/

Caveats

I don’t use the same word list as the NYT, because I don’t have theirs! A closer-match wordlist would be a very appreciated contribution.