It is an unfortunate reality that there is never enough time to discuss all the interesting science stories we encounter every month. In the past, we've presented year-end roundups of cool science stories that we (almost) missed. This year we are experimenting with a monthly collection. October's list includes the microstructural differences between regular and gluten-free spaghetti, capturing eye-catching snakes in action, the mystery behind the formation of Martian trenches, and – for all you word game lovers – an intriguing computational proof of the highest possible scoring Boggle board.
Highest scoring Boggle board
Sometimes we receive useful story tips from readers about uniquely interesting research projects. Sometimes these projects involve classic games like Boggle, in which players find as many words as possible from a 4×4 grid of cube-shaped dice with 16 letters within a certain time limit. Software engineer Dan Vanderkam alerted us to a preprint he posted on physics arXiv detailing his quest to find the Boggle board configuration that yields the highest possible score. It's pictured above, with a total score of 3,625 points, according to Vanderkam's first-ever computational proof. There are more than 1000 possible words, of which 'replaster' is the longest.
Vanderkam has extensively documented his search and its solution (including the code he used) on his blog, admitting to the Financial Times: “As far as I know, I'm the only person actually interested in this problem.” That's not entirely true: there was an attempt in 1982 that found an optimal board that yielded 2,195 points. Vanderkam's board was known as possibly the highest scoring board, but it was simply very difficult to prove using standard heuristic search methods. Vanderkam's solution involved grouping board configurations with similar patterns into classes, and finding upper bounds to eliminate obvious losers, rather than trying to sum the scores for each board separately – that is, an old-fashioned 'branch and bound' technique.
