WHAT, Wolfberg's Helpful Anagramming Tool, is really a toolbox of powerful tools, with many facilities.
This document describes the facilities in WHAT for performing challenge adjudications, especially in a tournament situation.
For about ten years, WHAT was a sold program, but as of January, 2015, it is a free program.
We now accept donations to support this software.
The WHAT program is available at no cost for downloading. It currently runs on on Microsoft Windows operating systems. We hope to also offer it on smart phones, especially on Androids at first.
Version 2.2 of WHAT comes with current the lexicons for adjudicating challenges. Assuming that is what you will be wanting, you can skip the remainder of this section.
When using WHAT only for challenge adjudications
in a tournament setting, you can ignore much of the available controls in
the WHAT window, including the menus.
One section of the window which may be of use is in the upper right, where
there is a set of tabs. One of those tabs is dedicated to the control of
which lexicons are involved in both anagramming and in challenges.
To see the current settings and to change them, click on the
Lexicons tab, and then click on the
WHAT is controlled mostly using a command line
interface, and there is a graphical user interface (GUI) to help you
construct these commands. Commands are typed into the program
in the black portion of the screen, which is called the workspace.
When WHAT
is waiting for you to type a new command, it prompts with:
WHAT?:
You are then expected to type a command on that very line following the
prompt. The typical use of the program
is to type single-line commands terminated by
pressing the Enter key.
If there is some error in your command, when you
have pressed Enter,
you will see an error message in the workspace, and
you will often see the first offending character colored red.
When using the program for challenge adjudications in a tourney setting, there is a small repertoire of commands you need to know in order to set up the program, and these will be covered below. The players using the program will not be using the command line interface. They will be typing into a Challenge Dialog which describes how to use it.
As the person setting up the program, you should be aware that pressing the Backspace key will erase the most recently typed-in character, and the cursor is moved to the left by one character. There are several other editing characters, but this one is the only one that is essential for you to know.
When you use WHAT in a club environment, it will likely be both for adjudicating challenges and also for doing game postmortems. However, in a tournament situation, the program will be constrained to operate only in the Challenge Dialog.
In the club environment, when you are using the program interactively and are dealing with the anagramming facilities, you can bring up the Challenge Dialog in many different ways:
The Challenge Dialog explains a few options of how to provide words to be adjudicated and how to get back to other WHAT use. Pressing Esc is the easiest way.
WHAT can be made to default to making a file of challenged words on specified days of the week and at specified times. You can override the default via the File menu or with the commands:
/+RC | - | turn on the recording of challenged words for other than tourney adjudications |
/-RC | - | turn off the recording of challenged words for other than tourney adjudications |
The WHAT initialization file (such as what2.ini), specifies the beginning of the path to use when creating such files.
When using the program other than in a tournament setting,
Without going into the Challenge Dialog,
WHAT can tell you whether an
individual word is acceptable in the primary and secondary lexicons:
<word-to-check>/-?
When using this command, recording of the word is not done.
Here are some guidelines for using WHAT in a tourney setting. There is on-line help available from within the program -- pick Tourney Challenge Adjudications... from the Help menu to see the following text.
When using WHAT to perform tourney adjudications, all challenged words are recorded in a file by default. You can inhibit this by including a minus sign when bringing up the Challenge Dialog with a password.
When using the program to adjudicate in other than the tourney style, you can control when challenged words are recorded using commands +RC and -RC, as mentioned above. You can also set up the program to do this recording according to the day of the week and hours.
When recording of challenged words is being done, this is indicated in the header line of the Challenge Dialog, where you can see the name of the file where the words are placed (using uppercase). The program makes a file name based on the date, and there is a file name prefix which you can adjust. The date for the file name is what the date was six hours earlier. In this way a late night session yields one file of recorded challenges, as long as challenges stop getting made before 6 a.m.
The program comes with the file name prefix
as sc, and
therefore on September 23, 2014, the challenged words file
would be:
You can change the prefix via the dialog to create a new initialization file; that dialog can be invoked via the File menu.
This introductory material should be sufficient for you to make effective use of the basic facilities of WHAT to the extent of using it to adjudicate challenges. There are considerably more facilities, which you can read about in the "WHAT User Guide" and other documents.