countdown solver

countdown-solver

Solving puzzles in the style of the game show Countdown.

This repository contains source code for a series of articles based on the game show Countdown. It contains code to solve puzzles from both the numbers rounds and letters rounds of that show.

The code
All code is in plain, modern JavaScript. Type information suitable for TypeScript is included in the doc comments.

Word list
A suitable word list in included under letters-round/. It should be similar enough to the official list of words allowed on the show for most purposes. Although potentially offensive words are generally allowed on the show, I've excluded them from this list. The purpose is not censorship, but simply to avoid shocking unsuspecting users. Be aware, though, that I might have missed some.

Ternary trees
For the letters round, the articles develop a minimal implementation of ternary search trees. I've also made a more featureful implementation with proper Unicode support, more types of approximate matching, serialization, and more. It is available here:

https://github.com/CGJennings/fast-ternary-string-set

Also available as the npm package fast-ternary-string-set.