> Driven “by the thrill of discovery”, Vanderkam has searched for this board, essentially alone, since 2004. He would scrape together computing time on Google’s hardware for heavy Boggle computation, all along documenting his efforts on his blog.
> “As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who is actually interested in this problem,” Vanderkam said.
> “As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who is actually interested in this problem,” Vanderkam said.
For context, many people are interested in finding high-scoring Boggle boards, usually via simulated annealing, hillclimbing, or genetic algorithms. But so far as I can tell, I'm the only one interested in _proving_ that a particular board is best. Doing that was the new result here.
I once spent a little time writing code to find the longest possible boggle word and found there were a few candidates. Interesting things I noted that weren’t entirely obvious: the longest word is actually 17 characters, not 16, because of the “Qu” side, and there are actually lots of words that are impossible, because for example there is only one J and only one B and they are on the same die.
I don’t remember all the longest words but sesquicentennials was one of them.
Finding the highest-scoring board with a 16- or 17-letter word is a fun, but very different problem. There are few enough "Hamiltonian paths" through the all the letters on a 4x4 Boggle board (~68,000) and few enough 16 letter words (~2,000) that you can enumerate all pairs in an hour or two.
Depending on wordlist and whether you want a 16 or 17 letter word, you get "charitablenesses", "supernaturalised" (British spelling), "quadricentennials" or "quartermistresses". These boards all score considerably lower than the REPLASTERING board. Full results here:
https://github.com/danvk/hybrid-boggle/#highest-scoring-boar...
I hadn't realized until I did this "side quest" that most wordlists top out at 15 letter words. That makes sense for a Scrabble dictionary, but it's not great for Boggle.
Ok so English max is 3,625 points from 1,045 words (with ENABLE2K word list).
Why not compute the max possible Boggle board for other languages: French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, Czech... they each have a different set of 16 dice x 6 faces [], and of course totally different wordlists:
It's open source, take a crack at it! Or file an issue requesting it.
This analysis doesn't make use of the Boggle dice. It assumes that any cell can be any letter. In practice, all high-scoring boards can be rolled with the Boggle dice. My code does assume the letters are A-Z, though, so the Ñ die in Spanish Boggle would require some code changes.
Ok, but then a) we'd need to refine the issue to "enhance request to handle every non-ASCII character/digram that could occur in other Boggle languages":
- Spanish: ñ
- Czech: no extra characters (e.g. 'E' can be used in words as E, É and Ì)
- Danish/Norwegian: do Boggle dice use æ,å,ø ? I searched but couldn't find out.
- Filipino: ñ . And separately in some wordgames (e.g. Scrabble knockoffs), I see 'ng' treated as a single digraph. Apparently it's officially a separate digraph, so the Tagalog alphabet ('abakada') has 28 letters.
And b) if we have rare characters on a few dice (esp. the unofficial Bosnian one proposed), that imposes restrictions on your assumption that any cell can be any letter. So you'd have to postprocess to cull a few words that couldn't legally be made with that dice-set.
FT article: https://archive.ph/siaAO
His blog: https://www.danvk.org/blog.html
> Driven “by the thrill of discovery”, Vanderkam has searched for this board, essentially alone, since 2004. He would scrape together computing time on Google’s hardware for heavy Boggle computation, all along documenting his efforts on his blog.
> “As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who is actually interested in this problem,” Vanderkam said.