Making a cryptaritmetic solver in C++

Question

I am planning out a C++ program that takes 3 strings that represent a cryptarithmetic puzzle. For example, given TWO, TWO, and FOUR, the program would find digit substitutions for each letter such that the mathematical expression

   TWO 
+  TWO 
------
  FOUR

is true, with the inputs assumed to be right justified. One way to go about this would of course be to just brute force it, assigning every possible substitution for each letter with nested loops, trying the sum repeatedly, etc., until the answer is finally found.

My thought is that though this is terribly inefficient, the underlying loop-check thing may be a feasible (or even necessary) way to go--after a series of deductions are performed to limit the domains of each variable. I'm finding it kind of hard to visualize, but would it be reasonable to first assume a general/padded structure like this (each X represents a not-necessarily distinct digit, and each C is a carry digit, which in this case, will either be 0 or 1)? :

   CCC.....CCC
   XXX.....XXXX
+  XXX.....XXXX
----------------
  CXXX.....XXXX 

With that in mind, some more planning thoughts:

-Though leading zeros will not be given in the problem, I probably ought to add enough of them where appropriate to even things out/match operands up.

-I'm thinking I should start with a set of possible values 0-9 for each letter, perhaps stored as vectors in a 'domains' table, and eliminate values from this as deductions are made. For example, if I see some letters lined up like this

 A
 C
--
 A

, I can tell that C is zero and this eliminate all other values from its domain. I can think of quite a few deductions, but generalizing them to all kinds of little situations and putting it into code seems kind of tricky at first glance.

-Assuming I have a good series of deductions that run through things and boot out lots of values from the domains table, I suppose I'd still just loop over everything and hope that the state space is small enough to generate a solution in a reasonable amount of time. But it feels like there has to be more to it than that! -- maybe some clever equations to set up or something along those lines.

Tips are appreciated!

Answer 1

You could iterate over this problem from right to left, i.e. the way you'd perform the actual operation. Start with the rightmost column. For every digit you encounter, you check whether there already is an assignment for that digit. If there is, you use its value and go on. If there isn't, then you enter a loop over all possible digits (perhaps omitting already used ones if you want a bijective map) and recursively continue with each possible assignment. When you reach the sum row, you again check whether the variable for the digit given there is already assigned. If it is not, you assign the last digit of your current sum, and then continue to the next higher valued column, taking the carry with you. If there already is an assignment, and it agrees with the last digit of your result, you proceed in the same way. If there is an assignment and it disagrees, then you abort the current branch, and return to the closest loop where you had other digits to choose from.

The benefit of this approach should be that many variables are determined by a sum, instead of guessed up front. Particularly for letters which only occur in the sum row, this might be a huge win. Furthermore, you might be able to spot errors early on, thus avoiding choices for letters in some cases where the choices you made so far are already inconsistent. A drawback might be the slightly more complicated recursive structure of your program. But once you got that right, you'll also have learned a good deal about turning thoughts into code.

Answer 2

I solved this problem at my blog using a randomized hill-climbing algorithm. The basic idea is to choose a random assignment of digits to letters, "score" the assignment by computing the difference between the two sides of the equation, then altering the assignment (swap two digits) and recompute the score, keeping those changes that improve the score and discarding those changes that don't. That's hill-climbing, because you only accept changes in one direction. The problem with hill-climbing is that it sometimes gets stuck in a local maximum, so every so often you throw out the current attempt and start over; that's the randomization part of the algorithm. The algorithm is very fast: it solves every cryptarithm I have given it in fractions of a second.