Solving The NY Times Games

A “puzzling” project.

For around a year, I’ve been playing puzzles on The NY Times website. I highly recommend these puzzles to anyone who’s looking for something to challenge their mind.

Around a week back, I began coding algorithms that could be used to solve the puzzles (particularly Letter Boxed and Spelling Bee). I’ve basically dedicated a class to each puzzle so that the member variables of the class stay organized (the class names are LetterBoxed, SpellingBee, etc.). Here’s the link to the GitHub repository if you would like to check it out.

The objective of Letter Boxed is to make words with letters on the sides of a square, where consecutive letters cannot be from the same side. Additionally, the game gives you targets, like “try to solve in $5$ words” or “try to solve in $6$ words.” Although you can solve the puzzle in those many words, I aim to solve it in $1$ or maximum $2$ words.

However, the main challenge is to obtain a word list that contains words that match up closely with the word list that NY Times uses. For now, I’m using an Oxford English Dictionary containing $400000+$ words in a text file (link). If you find a better word list, please add it to the repository’s GitHub discussion.

I’ll probably make the LetterBoxed class into a library available on the blog pretty soon.

The SpellingBee class is still in its early stages of development.