English dictionary search

dibianca · April 22, 2020, 7:41pm

I’m toying with the idea of an English dictionary search that could determine if a word typed by a player is an English word or not. The dictionary would be part of the game file.

Have any games tackled this problem already?

I assume the best approach would be to create a hash table and either compile it with the game, or load it from a file. Maybe I6 code is necessary? Is this feasible? Any advice appreciated.

HanonO · April 22, 2020, 8:12pm

One of the Vorple extension examples does a Wikipedia lookup. See “The Sum of Human Knowledge”

github.com

vorple/inform7/blob/master/Extensions/Juhana Leinonen/Vorple.i7x#L960


			let real time be the number returned by the JavaScript command;
			let story time be ((the hours part of the time of day) * 60) + the minutes part of the time of day;
			let time difference be real time - story time;
			increase the time of day by time difference minutes. 
			
	To say synchronized time:
		synchronize clocks;
		say the time of day.
		


Example: **** The Sum of Human Knowledge - Retrieving and displaying data from a third party service.


Here we set up an encyclopedia that can be used to query articles from Wikipedia. The actual querying code is a bit longer so it's placed in an external encyclopedia.js file, which can be downloaded from http://vorple-if.com/doc/resources.zip . Put the file in the project's Resources folder to include it with the release.


Note that the pause between issuing the lookup command and the encyclopedia text appearing on the screen is caused by the time it takes to send a request to and receive a response from Wikipedia.


	*: "The Sum of Human Knowledge"
	
	Include Vorple by Juhana Leinonen.
	Release along with the "Vorple" interpreter.
	Release along with JavaScript "encyclopedia.js".

dibianca · April 22, 2020, 8:53pm

I’m presuming I can come up with the dictionary list I want, and the hash table. I’m mostly wondering how to include (or load) and search a big hash table. Maybe other projects have used hash tables for other purposes?

Draconis · April 22, 2020, 11:28pm

Counterfeit Monkey uses something similar to a hash table to speed up the object name manipulations. It’s a fairly simple one, but it does show how writing hash functions in Inform can be unreasonably difficult.