Show HN: I built an app to find words in Letterpress

by altlabs • 14 years ago

18 22 14 years ago

selectout• 14 years ago

Haha, great little app. For the benefit of the 'cheaters' out there that use this I would recommend adding it so that it shows maybe 10 of the longest words and options to view more, then 10 of maybe 5-7 letters long, then 25 of the sub 5 letter words. That way people can easier pick believable words instead of unbelievable words like "whirlybirds" or 'discursively'. Maybe that's just me though.

With that said...don't cheat.

altlabs4• 14 years ago

Thanks! I am currently working on breaking the words down into groups just like that. Hope to push it out soon.

orofino• 14 years ago

filtering on a particular letter would be good as well, using a 'q' without a 'u' is a pain, but none of the words suggested have the q used because the words are too short.

aaronbrethorst• 14 years ago

Neat. I look forward to the inevitable OCR-based iOS app.

gingerlime• 14 years ago

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but what is Letterpress? Pretty much everything I managed to find online was describing a method for printing...

ehamberg• 14 years ago

It's a new iOS game. https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/letterpress-word-game/id5266...

dave84• 14 years ago

Great stuff. I have a Python version here: https://github.com/thedavesims/LetterHack

It was very basic but it's had some great contributions since.

altlabs4• 14 years ago

Just pushed out a few changes. You can now see all words plus filter based on word length.

davidwen• 14 years ago

Nice! What dictionary did you use? Do you know if it's the same one that LetterPress uses?

I've been thinking about coding a player for LetterPress. Longest word mixed in with some endgame logic would actually probably do fairly well against most players, but it'd be interesting to see what other strategies would come into play.

altlabs4• 14 years ago

I was cheeky and pulled the dictionary out of Letterpress. Once I've cleaned up the code I will push it to Github.

kaffeinecoma2• 14 years ago

Interesting. I'm working on a similar app, mostly to show off an OCR library I'm working on for fun: http://wordhelper.net/contact.

dancarlson• 14 years ago

I was thinking about doing this yesterday too. : - ). But I am too lazy.

My idea was to create an iOS app that analyzed a screenshot taken of a letterpress screen. That way you could also optimize for not using dark-red letter colours. Maybe you should try that!

jmacdotorg• 14 years ago

Consider limiting your use of tools like this (in Letterpress or any other word game) to games you play with friends where both parties agree to a no-holds-barred cheatfest. It makes the game entirely different, as well as giving you a fun way to deploy cheat-tools without actually cheating.

An example from Andy Baio: https://twitter.com/waxpancake/status/261990545570799616

talentless• 14 years ago

I am not sure if the app is using the right dictionary or if it is broken in Chrome. I used the string "AARGHQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQQ" to run a search and it returned no results. "aargh" is in the Letterpress dictionary.

I wrote a quick Python script last week that took the board position and returned the unplayed word with the highest point values (with a winning move being worth the max value). I thought about expanding it to look ahead, but it wasn't needed to beat human opponents.

The coup de grace would be to bundle it all up as an app that pulled from the camera roll and spat out a move.

altlabs4• 14 years ago

I'll look into that. I am using the Letterpress dictionary.

mauricesvay• 14 years ago

I've already released an app with OCR, all HTML5 and runs in the browser : https://github.com/mauricesvay/CheaterPress

kaffeinecoma2• 14 years ago

That is really impressive. My OCR solution (see comment above) uses a neural net on the server. Your code is both simpler and faster. Nice job.

jlees• 14 years ago

Looks like many of us had the same idea here. I've been trying to hack together iOS OCR libraries but realised it's actually quite doable without, so derailed a little and therefore got beaten to the post by you all :-) My thought being that the lowest level of friction always wins.

The other option would be to use some magic similar to Dropbox's Camera Upload to automatically save screenshots in the cloud, check whether they're Letterpress, and run server side analysis with a push notification. Feels like a gaping privacy hole there, so I didn't investigate.

My motivation is that a lot of the opponents I've been playing are coming up with the craziest words (and I'm a fairly literate person and regular Scrabble player). At that point, it just boils down to who has the best cheat program :-)

biturd• 14 years ago

Why not just have the user submit a screenshot? Safari supports file uploads now so you could go 100% web based if desired. Or if you are iOS fluent, you could make an app that takes the screenshot for you by grabbing the last picture in your camera roll.

From there, with how simple the board UI is, it should be pretty easy to OCR it. Drop the color and you are 90% there.

There was a Where's Waldo post on HN about 2 days ago. Finding Waldo in that mess involved a bit more work and thought to chose what to look for. In this case it was the bands in the striped shirt that were most if the give-away.

I think you could do a nice app in iOS, though I personally hate the cheating apps. I wish games like Words With Friends, Scrabble, etc., would tell you if the player was in game or not, and possibly what app they switched to. Or provide a lockout mode where switching costs you the game.

Multi-tasking is a needed ability at times, and done games are long play, but certain cheater friends could be locked into a game they can't cheat in, which would be a nice feature.

cncool• 14 years ago

I have created an iOS app already whereby the user can import a screenshot of the game (in any orientation or theme), and it will give you the best results. It should be in review soon.

sucrenoir• 14 years ago

I also made a small command line ruby script to search words. Quite slow but get the work done. https://github.com/iesta/lettercheat

dhm116• 14 years ago

I've got a python version as well that uses the multiprocessing library to try to speed things up a bit - https://github.com/dhm116/pyletterpress

Show HN: I built an app to find words in Letterpress

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