[HN Gopher] Lone coder cracks 50-year puzzle to find Boggle's to...
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Lone coder cracks 50-year puzzle to find Boggle's top-scoring board
Author : DavidSJ
Score : 69 points
Date : 2025-05-24 18:24 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ft.com)
| smcin wrote:
| His blog post announcing it:
| https://www.danvk.org/2025/04/23/boggle-solved.html
|
| 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._
| danvk wrote:
| > "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.
| robinhouston wrote:
| It was a fun surprise to see this story on the front page of this
| morning's Financial Times. It's very unusual in my experience for
| this sort of thing to be picked up by the mainstream media before
| it's on HN or similar. I wonder how the FT reporter came across
| the story.
| wdumaresq wrote:
| This was posted on HN about a month ago:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774702
| robinhouston wrote:
| Thanks. What's particularly embarrassing is that I found that
| submission this morning, and read the comments on it, and
| then somehow forgot about its existence until you reminded me
| of it just now.
| jonplackett wrote:
| Thank you. I felt something must have been seriously wrong in
| the world that the FT knew this before any HN contributor.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _After 20 years, the globally optimal Boggle board_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774702 - April 2025
| (23 comments)
|
| How did that spend only 6 hours on HN's frontpage? I'm gonna
| email danvk right now
| danvk wrote:
| "Lone coder" here. I reached out to Ollie (the FT reporter)
| because he'd written a book (Seven Games) about computers and
| games, so I thought the Boggle story might interest him. It
| did!
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| Nice work! I love an "impossible" problem that falls to
| bounding estimates like this one does. There was a
| surprisingly lot of work done in protein folding that had
| similar sorts of techniques to eliminate structures that
| would either never happen or would self destruct if they did
| kinds of things.
| robinhouston wrote:
| Congratulations, Lone Coder! Both for the exciting work and
| for getting it on the front page of the FT. Just amazing on
| both counts.
| cgreerrun wrote:
| > The code is a mixture of C++ for performance-critical parts and
| Python for everything else. They're glued together using
| pybind11, which I'm a big fan of.
|
| Nice, I'm a big fan of this combo! Hits the right balance of
| prototype speed plus performance.
| everyone wrote:
| I love scrabble and boggle, but to me there is tension between
| just playing for points according to a certain set of rules, and
| playing to form nice satisfying words.. eg. in scrabble you could
| use all sorts of bullshit scrabble words that are in SOWPODS like
| "za" and "qi", but imo its sort of undignified and cheesy to do
| so.
| pretzellogician wrote:
| I used to agree with you. But there's a slippery slope. At what
| point is a word "bullshit"? What if you simply have a better
| vocabulary than other players?
|
| Our family compromise has always been, if it's valid _and_ you
| know its definition (like "qi" and "za"), you can play it.
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