A Computational Proof of the Highest-Scoring Boggle Board

Exciting news! This is the best possible Boggle board: Boggle is a word search game. You form words by connecting adjacent letters, including along diagonals. Longer words score more points. Good words on this board include STRANGERS and PLASTERING. After you spend three minutes trying to find as many words as you can, you’ll be struck by just how good computers are at this. Using the ENABLE2K word list, this board has 3,625 points on it coming from 1,045 words. This board has more points than any other. Try any other combination of letters and you’ll get a lower score. While I’ve long suspected this board was the winner, I’ve now proven it via exhaustive search. Many people have searched for high-scoring boards before, but no one has ever constructed a computational proof that they’ve found the best one. This is a new, first of its kind result for Boggle. To see why this is interesting, let’s go back to the 1980s. High-Scoring Boggle and Local Optima With the release of the Appl ... Read full article.