[jim-jim-jim]

Very cool. I also wrote a solver using the NYT magazine's rules back in 2018, and found the bitwise method of matching both 1 and 3 point values incredibly fast. I just precalculated the hashes and ran a parallel loop over the whole array, but I know there are specialized data structures that games like Scrabble use. I wonder if that would have sped things up even more.

Anyway, whenever I see a problem that involves letters now, I reach for bit operators first.