
Show HN: I built an app to find words in Letterpress - altlabs
http://letterwords.co/
======
selectout
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.

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

~~~
orofino
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.

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jlees
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
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.

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talentless
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.

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

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

~~~
kaffeinecoma
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.

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kaffeinecoma
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>.

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jmacdotorg
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>

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davidwen
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.

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

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dancarlson
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!

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dave84
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.

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dhm116
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>

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

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cncool
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.

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

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gingerlime
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
It's a new iOS game. [https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/letterpress-word-
game/id5266...](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/letterpress-word-
game/id526619424?mt=8)

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

