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Lone coder cracks 50-year puzzle to find Boggle's top-scoring board


‘Remarkably old-school’ method establishes supremacy of 1,045-word grid

Dan Vanderkam, a freelance software engineer, has discovered the game’s highest-scoring board, solving a puzzle unanswered since Boggle was introduced more than 50 years ago. The former Google employee, who lives in New York state, used some 23,000 hours of computing power to identify the winning grid of 16 letters, which contains more than 1,000 words with “replastering” the longest of all. But he was enchanted by the game’s underlying structure and mathematics, which is the stuff of rich analysis: data, algorithms, tree diagrams and powers of 10.

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