About

Herminia is an automatic solver for Mezcladitos (WordCrack) boards.

WordCrack is a multi-platform mobile phone game (see http://www.mezcladitos.com/)

The idea is to find all the possible words which can be formed with adjacent letters in two minutes.

Herminia is composed by different subtools: a main script, an image-processing tool and a C++ solving tool.

The main script (run_herminia.py) is to be launched before a game starts. Once the game has started, press Enter. The script will take a screenshot of the board and pause the game. It will then invoke the image-processing tool and generate a txt file representing the board.

Herminia's C++ solver takes a text file representing the board to solve. This file must be formatted like:

• Four lines, each line composed of four tokens separated by a blank space.
• Each token represents a tile in the board.
• A tile is represented as <letter><value><multiplier_if_any>

See exampleboard.png and exampleboard.txt for an example.

Once this board has been automatically generated, the solving tool uses it to generate two files. One contains the words and their score and the other one contains the coordinates of the tiles of the letters forming each word in pixels. These values are, obviously, device dependent, and at the moment are set up for a Moto G. It can easily be adapted by changing the values inside src/ScreenDimensions.h.

The main script then takes the output coordinates and uses it to automatically play the game for us, playing the most valuable words first.

Requirements

• monkeyrunner
• tesseract-ocr
• Different Python packages specified in requirements.txt

Using virtualenv is not required but strongly suggested.

Building Herminia

To install the dependencies:

1. Install monkeyrunner as part of Android's SDK and add it to PATH.
2. sudo apt-get install tesseract-ocr
3. pip install -r requirements.txt

To build the C++ tools simply run make

Using Herminia

There two uses for Herminia.

The first one is to simply find the words, using the C++ solver. In that case, run:

./herminia--dict <dictionary> --board <board> --outwords <words> --outcoords <coords>

The second one is to have Herminia also play for you. In that case, change the values inside python_tools/herminia_config.py for your setup (this includes screen-related values, so make sure you change them if using something different than a MotoG), make sure that the C++ tool is adapted to your device's screen by setting the values inside src/ScreenDimensions.h, rebuild Herminia and run:

python run_herminia.py

About MonkeyRunner and Jython

monkeyrunner runs on Jython, which is based on Python 2.5. That means that getting a regular Python script to work with it can be tedious (having to install modules for 2.5, importing stuff from __future__, etc.). Therefore, for this project I decided to do something very hacky: run all the code in Python, and create scripts for the monkeyrunner parts which are run as a subprocess.

This way, code which doesn't need monkeyrunner can use all the new Python features and there is no need to install modules for Python 2.5.