This is a collection of tools implented as javascript to run in a browser, relating to a (once) commercially available tabletop game using tiles.
A group on the cruise ship "Ventura" played the "twist" game variant with unofficial rules emphasizing finding complete solutions with no tiles left over, rather than minimising outstanding point values.
The code on the web page "play.html" allows for entering of all groups on the table, as well as the tiles in a player's rack, and looks for a complete solution.
At this point the code seems correct, and can frequently either find a solution or exhaustively determine that there is no solution within seconds to a few minutes. On some occasions though, it can take hours or perhaps much longer.
"tests.html" contains a test suite and a facility for solving a single input string.
"random.html" generates random sets of tiles and attempts to solve them.
The guts of the implementation in rummi.js is the method "canadd", which generates legal combinations of tiles, and "solveN", which does the search for solutions. SolveN recurses once per tile used, so with 112 tiles in the game 112 is the stack depth. It would be possible to build explicit stacks and change the recursion to a loop.
The solve code runs in a WebWorker to allow the UI thread to stay responsive. It uses only a single one; it would be possible to pool a few WebWorkers and parallelise the search.
Next phase is either better search pruning (possibly involving some cache?), or better UI (being developed on a cruise ship without internet access, the developer could only really use features he already knew).