Lone coder cracks 50-year puzzle to find Boggle's top-scoring board
16 comments
·May 24, 2025smcin
danvk
> “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
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
"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
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
Congratulations, Lone Coder! Both for the exciting work and for getting it on the front page of the FT. Just amazing on both counts.
wdumaresq
This was posted on HN about a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43774702
dang
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
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
Thank you. I felt something must have been seriously wrong in the world that the FT knew this before any HN contributor.
cgreerrun
> 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
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
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.
Clood5
[dead]
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.