

Hacker News Word Search - wsman
http://www.mywordpuzzles.com/hnws/

======
1331
I used to teach English to young kids in Korea about ten years ago. The
curriculum was set by the school, and a common task was doing word search
puzzles. Some students were adept at finding words, and many other students
would try to get through the task as quickly as possible by cheating off of
them. Aside from the obvious strategy of rule enforcement, one way to
discourage cheating is to simply give each student a different puzzle. The
words to find are the same, but the arrangement of letters is different for
each student.

It is trivial to write a program to generate word search puzzles, so I decided
to make the problem more interesting by adding a difficulty parameter. I could
generate puzzles with a range of difficulty by varying the following factors:

* direction -- more difficult puzzles have answers in diagonal and/or reverse directions

* density -- more difficult puzzles do not necessarily have the answers uniformly distributed in the grid but can have dense groupings

* dummy words -- since some students search for any words in the grid, you can fill it with words that are not actually target words to make the task more difficult

* decoys -- you can fill the grid with slight deviations of target words in order to make finding the actual target more difficult

------
po
I like the raphael.js highlighting interface. Would be nice to get a
randomized puzzle/wordbank.

Small bug: if you highlight the same word over and over again, it will
eventually say "Good Work!" as if you finished the puzzle.

~~~
wsman
Oops Thank you!!!!

