Providing you are aware of prefix trees. I guess you could come up with the idea independently but I would assume a lot of people when presented with the problem wouldn't.
At the end of my first year of my software engineering degree I wrote a Boggle solving program in C# using a trie. About a year later I discovered that tries are a recognised data structure and that I wasn't the first person to use one.
I know a programmer who's been working in the industry since the 70s, she did the same damn thing when she was young with the same exact data structure.
