---
title: "A Scrabble Crossword Game Playing Program"
authors:
  - "Stuart C. Shapiro"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/175"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1979/0175.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1979
pages: ""
track: ""
keywords:
---

# A Scrabble Crossword Game Playing Program

Stuart C. Shapiro

*Proceedings of the Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*.

## Abstract

A program that plays the SCRABBLE Crossword Game has been designed and implemented in SIMULA 67 on a DECSystem-10 and in Pascal on a CYBER 173. The heart of the design is the data structure for the lexicon and the algorithm for searching it. The lexicon is represented as a letter table, or trie using a canonical ordering of the letters in the words rather than the original spelling. The algorithm takes the trie and a collection of letters, including blanks, and finds all words that can be formed from any cOmbination and permutation of the letters. Words are found in approximately the order of their value in the game.