This week I made a lot of progress with the hint generation. Right now, we can find all the horizontal words possible given the state of the board and rack. There is still one bug that I need to fix dealing with anchor squares which also have a filled square to the left. I just need to remove those anchor squares from the anchor list so that invalid words don’t propagate through, which shouldn’t be hard to fix. I also need to generalize the algorithm to the vertical direction. The hard part was already done in the horizontal direction, so the vertical functions should be easy to implement as they are just the transpose of the horizontal functions. Shown below is a snippet of the list of valid words, along with there start and end square, that the backtracking function returns.
