Words With Friends Bingos, Redux

In my last post, I described writing a program to find the five-letter combinations most likely to yield a bingo in Words With Friends.

Then I realized there was a subtle bug.

Consider the word abreast. When you look at how Ruby's combination method splits it up, you'll see two entries equivalent to STARE, because there are two a's. This is correct from a programming view, but from a player's perspective, it doesn't matter. Having STARE is sufficient to get to abreast. You don't view the a's as different.

Here is the new word list with the corrected code. TEARS and TIERS are still your best bet, but the list has shifted a bit and the numbers are different.

aerst 1295
eirst 1237
aeirs 988
aeist 984
einst 983
einrs 972
eorst 949
aelrs 940
eerst 920
aeins 854
aeirt 816
aenrs 805
aenst 799
eeirs 792
aelst 788
eilst 782
aeint 765
aeils 765
ainst 751
eilrs 748

And here's the corrected script.

# find the 5-letter combos most represented in 7- or 8-letter words

wordlist = ARGV[0]

combos_to_count = Hash.new(1)

File.open(wordlist,"r") do |file|
   line = file.gets
   while(line)
      line = file.gets      
      if line then
          line.chomp!
          next if line.length != 7 && line.length != 8
          chars = line.split(//)
          unique_combos = []
          chars.combination(5) do |combo| 
              combo.sort! {|a,b| a <=> b}
              unique_combos << combo.join
          end
          unique_combos.uniq!
          unique_combos.each {|combo| combos_to_count[combo] = combos_to_count[combo] + 1}
      end
   end
end

sorted_combos = combos_to_count.sort {|a,b| b[1] <=> a[1]}
(0...20).each {|num| puts sorted_combos[num][0] + " " + sorted_combos[num][1].to_s}