Research overview: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

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 have presented year-end overviews of cool science stories we (almost) missed it. 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 include classic games such as Bogglein which players find as many words as possible from a 4×4 grid of cubic dice with 16 letters within a certain time limit. Software engineer Dan Vanderkam warned us about one a preprint he posted on physics arXiv, describing 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 does documented his search and its resolution (including the code he used) extensively on his blog, admits to the Financial Times that: “As far as I know, I am the only person who is 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.