Algorithm Challenge: Generating Valid Word Lists (Inspired by Letter Boxed)

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Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on small coding challenges in my free time to sharpen my algorithm and data structure skills, and one of the things that inspired me recently was a word puzzle game called Letter Boxed. In the game, players connect letters from different sides to form valid words under certain constraints. It’s surprisingly fun but also quite algorithmically interesting!

That got me thinking: What’s the best way to approach generating valid word combinations algorithmically given a set of letters with constraints on usage?

Specifically, I’m trying to solve this problem in MQL5:

Given:

  • A set of letters grouped into “sides”
  • A rule that each new word must start with the last letter of the previous word
  • A dictionary of valid words

I want to generate a sequence of valid words that:

  1. Uses all letters at least once
  2. Follows the rule above

I’ve tried a backtracking approach where I recursively attempt to build sequences, but it gets slow quickly if the dictionary is large. Before I optimize further, I wanted to get some feedback:

  • Has anyone implemented similar constraint‑based sequence generation in MQL5?
  • What data structures or techniques did you find effective for pruning the search space?
  • Would a trie or letter‑frequency map improve performance here over a naive list scan?
  • Are there built‑in MQL5 functions worth leveraging (like optimized string or array methods)?

If you’ve tackled anything like this, or have ideas on efficient word filtering or sequence generation, I’d love to hear your approach!

Thanks in advance.

 
Hellen charless:

Hi everyone,

I’ve been working on small coding challenges in my free time to sharpen my algorithm and data structure skills, and one of the things that inspired me recently was a word puzzle game called Letter Boxed. In the game, players connect letters from different sides to form valid words under certain constraints. It’s surprisingly fun but also quite algorithmically interesting!

That got me thinking: What’s the best way to approach generating valid word combinations algorithmically given a set of letters with constraints on usage?

Specifically, I’m trying to solve this problem in MQL5:

Given:

  • A set of letters grouped into “sides”
  • A rule that each new word must start with the last letter of the previous word
  • A dictionary of valid words

I want to generate a sequence of valid words that:

  1. Uses all letters at least once
  2. Follows the rule above

I’ve tried a backtracking approach where I recursively attempt to build sequences, but it gets slow quickly if the dictionary is large. Before I optimize further, I wanted to get some feedback:

  • Has anyone implemented similar constraint‑based sequence generation in MQL5?
  • What data structures or techniques did you find effective for pruning the search space?
  • Would a trie or letter‑frequency map improve performance here over a naive list scan?
  • Are there built‑in MQL5 functions worth leveraging (like optimized string or array methods)?

If you’ve tackled anything like this, or have ideas on efficient word filtering or sequence generation, I’d love to hear your approach!

Thanks in advance.

Regarding string fragments:

Finding, replacing, and extracting string fragments - Common APIs - MQL5 Programming for Traders

Regarding more efficient integer values of strings:

Working with symbols and code pages - Common APIs - MQL5 Programming for Traders
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