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

114 DavidSJ 24 5/24/2025, 6:24:05 PM ft.com ↗

Comments (24)

smcin · 8h ago

His blog post announcing it: https://www.danvk.org/2025/04/23/boggle-solved.html

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 · 5h ago

> “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 · 7h ago

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.

danvk · 5h ago

"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 · 5h ago

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 · 5h ago

Congratulations, Lone Coder! Both for the exciting work and for getting it on the front page of the FT. Just amazing on both counts.

dodongobongo · 4h ago

I love that book. Good choice and congratulations on your find.

wdumaresq · 6h ago

This was posted on HN about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774702

dang · 5h ago

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

robinhouston · 6h ago

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 · 6h ago

Thank you. I felt something must have been seriously wrong in the world that the FT knew this before any HN contributor.

noitpmeder · 4h ago

The author himself was the original submitter.

cgreerrun · 7h ago

> 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.

jebarker · 3h ago

> "As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who is actually interested in this problem"

I think this is a really interesting problem but I have to admit that if I'd heard it stated I would have guessed the answer was already known. I love the persistence on display here in spite of it being a "low status" problem. Reminds me of the recent discovery of a new largest (Mersenne?) prime, just someone getting nerd sniped and willing to spend their time and money.

sphars · 2h ago

> The problem is hard because examining every possible Boggle board is unfeasible. There are something like a 20-digit number of them and scoring every one — even at Vanderkam’s pacy 200,000 boards a second — would take 800mn years.

> It took 23,000 CPU hours on a high-end 192-core machine in the cloud — time worth about $1,200, across five human days.

Pardon the pun but the sheer amount of possible boards is mind boggling. Impressive how he managed to cut it down by magnitudes.

everyone · 6h ago

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.

npteljes · 3h ago

This is the same thing I realized when being a "game master" of the shooter matches we used to hold on my previous project. The end goal of that play was fun, not to determine who has the most technical skill. After realizing this in my head, and also implementing it as additional rules for the game, the game sessions became much more enjoyable for everyone, participation, enjoyment, and desire to return for another session was through the roof.

That said, both kinds of play has its place, in my life at least. Staying on the topic of shooters, when I play online in ranked, it's all out for me, and I enjoy that as well, in a different way. But when playing with my wife, it's never all out, always friendly.

throwaway81523 · 4h ago

Like this person, I also remembered the Notre Dame Scrabble Team fight song. I found this post by web search on the words.

https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=45390#671943

Added: I think s/he got some of the words slightly wrong!

pretzellogician · 6h ago

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.

aabhay · 4h ago

Easier rule is just to exclude two letter words, or make two letter words zero points (so you can get rid of your Qs and Zs if you wish

Sesse__ · 4h ago

If you exclude two-letter words, you are also excluding nearly all overlaps and parallel plays.

38 · 4h ago

Mirror?

sphars · 3h ago

Posted above: https://archive.ph/siaAO

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

Comments (24)