Recently during my lunch time I was playing an old Infocom text adventure game that had a word search puzzle in it. I was really bored (hey, I was playing an old Infocom game!) so I decided to whip up a LabVIEW program to do this word search. Way overkill, obviously, but it was something to keep me busy. I tried out a couple of different ideas for an implementation and finally settled on one to do the word search. It's not optimized, but it works. I then started to wonder if this would make for an interesting coding challenge. That is, to come up with the fastest algorithm that could find a list of words in a given matrix of letters. The solution would have to be scalable so that it could accommodate very large matrices without choking, as well as be spoken-language independent. Any interest?
