Serious Cheating in Word Making Games with Specific Letters using Fast Correct Word Finder by Neural Match Tree: High-Performance Data Structure and Algorithms for Word Processing Games

Abstract

Word-making games (WMG) are a particular type of puzzle game that is educational and suitable for memory strength improvement. There are many types of WMG, like using specific letters or optional letters by player. Cheating in games always is interesting for players, mainly in competitive social games. Cheating in social computer-based WMG is very hard because it is a real-time game and depends on players' speed, so there is no time to check dictionaries. If we have an online dictionary on a computer, checking the existence of different combinations and permutations of letters in the dictionary is time-consuming, too. We coded a program to do this job, and it is slower than a good player considering the vast number of words in the dictionary and too many permuted words. This study introduces a new prefix tree-based -or Trie-called neural match tree (NMT) to save the dictionary and reduce the search time. Moreover, the proposed method reduces the number of permutations precisely to the number of defined words. The experimental results show more than 99% improvement relative and averagely more than 100K times absolutely for speed versus brute force. This kind of cheating can be known as serious cheating against serious games, which involves technical and creative solutions to win a game.