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
Nice, I'm a big fan of this combo! Hits the right balance of prototype speed plus performance.
Our family compromise has always been, if it's valid and you know its definition (like "qi" and "za"), you can play it.
https://mudcat.org/thread.cfm?threadid=45390#671943
Added: I think s/he got some of the words slightly wrong!
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.
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.
> 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.
smcin•7h ago
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.
danvk•4h ago
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.