hoopajoo.net
Way overexcited about spelldown
Input the letters to make words with in the letters box, and a spec in the spec box. The spec is a string representing the words that need to be filled and the multipliers, e.g.:

1113,121 - A four letter word and a three letter word, the last letter of the four letter word is 3x and the second in the three letter word is 2x.

3/3/3 combos usually take a ridiculously long time, so the system is limted to 2 word combos only, up to 8 letters long, and a max of 15 letters in.

If you want to do more tests, download the script and play with it a home.

The scoring code works fine, it returns accurate results, but I can't seem to figure out how they determine if you get bonus time. It seems to award it if your average letter score is more than 1.5, but not always, and I can't find any reason to how many seconds you get, though the time you get is always the same for every word that does award time. If anyone has any insight, please contact me and I'll work it in to the program.

Another thing too, there are some people with 20,000+ points. Even with this script I can barely get more than 1000, I don't see how anyone can get as many points as the guys in the top 10 do.

UPDATE (7/8/02)! The magic has been mostly cracked. The new script can actually tell how many seconds you should be getting for the update, it's actually a pretty simple set up it seems. If you want more info, download the latest version and snoop the source code. In the mean time I'm working on having it keep a local "frequency" tab, so it can try and guess rarewords for bonus points. As it is now, you should almost always get time for any puzzle, and many times it will be 10-40 seconds of bonus time, which should keep the game going and let the scores rise. :)

UPDATE (7/16/02)! OK, it's all here now, lots of options and scriptable support. The latest version does all the scoring, sorting, has readline support, and allows multiple users to enter the data to try and get the fastest results. I have since taken it and created a spelldown bot called Ignignot, that can play the game practically forever. I let it run for 6 hours and it got 100000 points and have 200+ minutes of time left to play, then I stopped it. Previously the highest score on spelldown was 50000. Now the bot just plays indefinately. You can see screenshots here

Watch Ignignot play! (unavailable right now...) You can watch the bot while it plays by downloading VNC and connecting to hoopajoo.net:1 (preferably using 8-bit video mode for speed) which is the display being exported for viewing. It ignores all input so don't worry about screwing it up. If it's not responding, try again in a few minutes to see if it comes back up. You should probably also set the bpp to 8bit by using -bgr233 under *nix or /8bit under Windows, or check the "slow networks" thing under the options in the Windows client. If that's too much work, there are "streamed" screenshots being sent here. The VNC screen make take a few seconds to load, Ignignot is working very hard.

Look at the Spelldown Gallery with some high scoring screenshots.