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.

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.

> 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.

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.