One of my projects I had to do for my data structures class was a Boggle game in C++. It presented a very neat challenge of cataloging the English dictionary into the program. Throughout our data structures class, we found the best way to store the dictionary was through a hash table.

Hash tables are used to store very large amounts of information for fast searching, inserting, and removing. A hash table is compromised of an array of buckets. Each bucket is used to store a select set of information, usually within a singly linked list. You will want to write your hash table to work along with a singly linked list. In the case of the buckets being a singly linked list, you would use your array you made, and the [] operator, to access the appropriate singly linked list.

Check out how I constructed my Hash Table...

After constructing a hash table I have all the buckets I need, and I can call my saved hash function to find out where any data sent into find, insert, and remove, would be.

Hash functions are written to find which bucket a specific item should be in. They need to be written in accordance to what type of information you will be storing. That is why you pass in the hash function that you will write alongside your program, rather than writing it within your Hash Table data structure.

Lets see how I need to write my hash function in this situation. I could have stored the entire dictionary within a 26 bucket hash table, with a bucket for each letter of the alphabet. Then if I needed to find if a word the user typed was real, I would grab the first letter of the input, head to the appropriate bucket, and see if it was there. Unfortunately a hash table like I just described would be very slow. There would be thousands of words in some buckets. It would take quite a bit of time to iterate through all of these words.

I needed to write something more efficient as one of my goals for the project. My hash function was completed after quite a bit of trial and error. Once I knew what had to be done it was all about finding which numbers would work out the best. In the end, this is what my hash function looked like...

I wanted to generate a large number based on nearly every character in the word in order to make it very unique. I did not want to spend too much time looping through the words so I decided to loop through the length minus 2. I made 16691 buckets to store this information. I chose this number for two reasons:

These are the results...

I was amazed at how powerful that formula was! Out of 16691 buckets only 30 of them were empty and the largest bucket only held 18. Now my Boggle game can search the dictionary very quickly. It would only take a call to the hash function and iterating through a maximum of 18 words rather than searching through 110307 words.

The rest of the game consisted of programming the grid and scoring. If you need the source or you need help with programming our own version of Boggle feel free to contact me at mikesprogramming@gmail.com

Here is a link to the zipped up executable: Boggle.zip

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