Description
2 Countdown
“Countdown” is an English gameshow. In one of the Countdown games, contestants are given a set of random letters
which the contestants unscramble to find the longest word that can they can make using a subset from the randomly
chosen letters. The more entertaining variant of this show is called “8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown” where comedians perform the same tasks.
For example, given the set of letters “ionsomsti”, we can form the following words: “in”, “insist”, “mission”, “mitosis”, “omission”. Out of these words, the longest word is ”omission”, so “omission” would be the winning word from
the set of letters.
On “Countdown”, the number of scrambled letters provided is 9 and therefore the longest words possible can contain
9 letters. For our solution, we will not bound the maximum number of characters in the set of letters. We will instead
pass a string of letters and the string will dictate the maximum length of the available letters to choose from.
2.1 Instructions
This problem is similar to trying to find all anagrams in a dictionary for a given word or determining if a sentance is
a pangram; however, it is slightly more challenging because there is no guarantee that it is possible to use all letters
provided in the scrambled set of letters.
We will use the WordTool and dictionary of words to try to find the longest word possible to form from the scramble.
I have edited the words file to remove entries from the dictionary that contain special characters like contractions and
abbreviations, so you should use the words file provided in the assignment file.
A framework for this program has been provided in Countdown.java. You will implement three methods in the
Countdown class:
• WordGame
• contains
• Test3
You will not alter any of the other code in the framework, you will use the provided interfaces for the above methods,
and there is no need to add additional methods. There are three places that are marked with TODO that you will focus
on.
Read the documentation associated with each method and fulfill the requirements outlined by that method’s documentation. WordGame is intended to handle the selection of a word from the dictionary and then using the contains
method to see if the word contains a subset of the letters provided. The contains method is intended to see if the
word is contained in the set of letters.
The framework provides a set of “Unit Tests” to evaluate the algorithm. The first two unit tests are provided in the
methods Test1 and Test2. You will implement your own unit test in Test3. Your unit test must include a set of
letters containing at least 9 unique letters and must contain at least 3 vowels. Your program must pass all three tests to
be considered fully correct.
There may be a number of words with the same length that can be formed using the set of letters. We do not necessarily
need to know all words that can be formed using the set of letters, so we will pick the first word in the alphabet that is
the longest word. This offers a slight optimization but mostly it ensures that everyone gets the same answer to the first
two unit tests.
2.2 Notes
A function clean has been provided that will remove any non-alpha characters from a string, will lowercase the
cleaned string, and will return the lowercase, cleaned string. This method will ensure both that only legal letters are
evaluated and will eliminate edge cases that we really don’t want to deal with when preparing to compare string information.
The methods are documented using a style defined by Doxygen. This format allows documentation to be automatically
generated from source code. Note how this format documents what a function does, what each of the inputs represents,
and what the return value represents. In the future, your programs must include documentation of functions, and your
function documentation must meet these three criteria. You will not be expected to conform to the Doxygen format,
but you will not be discouraged from doing so.
2.3 Hint
The best approach to solve this problem was discussed in class as an approach to solving the StringExample
problems in Module 1. While most of this document talks about strings, the best solution to this problem involves
using arrays, so this problem is also about converting from one problem into another problem that is much easier to
solve.
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