Archive for January 13, 2011
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.