I’ve been doing the New York Times Spelling Bee. It’s a daily puzzle and it’s lots of fun.
Sometimes I manage to find all possible words. But that’s only on a good day.
The rules are always the same, but each day they change the configuration of letters. The result is that some days are fairly easy, and others are killer hard.
Based on the initial configuration of letters, every day has a particular maximum possible score. Which leads my mind to the following different puzzle:
Given the rules of Spelling Bee, what configuration of letters would produce the highest possible score?
It seems to me that this might be a challenging problem. My inclination would be to write a computer program to search through likely solutions.
But a likely solution is not a proof. A really interesting open challenge might be to prove that a particular configuration of letters produces the maximum possible score.
And that problem might be hard.
It’s likely the answer is rniEsta* or rniSeta but of course the question is, is it?
ps both solutions produce 12,220 words according to sbsolver.com: https://www.sbsolver.com/s/rnieSta https://www.sbsolver.com/s/rniEsta
my questions: is a non-exhaustive proof *possible*? if not, why not?
*Scrabble players in the know salivate over this rack as it’s known to produce the most bingos
Thanks Andy! Yes, I think the interesting mathematical question is how you would go about proving any of this.
It would also be a fascinating experiment to work each day’s pangram into conversation — a sort of literary outgrowth of the NY Times Spelling Bee.
Yes but what would the outgrowth of such a conversation be? What will you have wrought?
Nice one!