Word Squares Revisited

On December 22, I posed the following puzzle in the Square Deal post:

Create a 4 × 4 grid composed of common English words (you can use the list of official Scrabble four‑letter words as a reference) such that the sum of the point values of the 16 letters is as high as possible.

In that post, I mentioned that I had created a grid worth 62 points, and many readers have asked about it. Here it is:

Z	I	Z	Z
I	D	E	A
Z	E	S	T
Z	A	T	I

 

All of the words are acceptable when playing Scrabble. While IDEA and ZEST are very common, the other two are not:

• ZIZZ = a nap
• ZATI = a species of macaque

I am certain that a better solution exists, but I have neither the time nor the energy to search for it. Anyone out there want to write a computer program to solve it?

** UPDATE (1/14/11): Check out the comments section from the previous post. Veky Edgar wrote a computer program and found the maximum possible score (92 points), and Scandinavian manually created a grid worth 85 points.

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