I modified my solver from the previous post to also generate random puzzles, and analyzed the results of 100,000 runs. For these runs, I used a dictionary from github that claimed to be "the scrabble dictionary", though I have no way of verifying it. It contained 178691 words which I had to convert to lowercase due to the way my search program is implemented.
To the statistics:
- About 37% of puzzles did not result in a solution of up to 12 words
- The most frequent number of letters in a solution was 18; the least was 13 and the most was 38
- The median frequent number of letters in a solution was 19
- The most frequent and median number of words in a solution was 4; the least was 2 and the most was 10
- About 5% of puzzles with a solution had a 2-word solution; about 30% had a 3-word solution.
I haven't played enough official puzzles to know, but I suspect that there are additional constraints on the letters (For example, no Q without U; vowels on at least 3 edges), or puzzles are constrained by having at least one "relatively short" answer, or the puzzle is fully human curated.
Here's the worst puzzle I found, using that dictionary from above. It has a shortest solution of 10 words & 39 characters: fysvzhcplgim
puzzle answer for fys / vzh / cpl / gim
ghi - ich - hip - phiz - zips - shiv - vivific - chili - ism - myc
Not all of those seem like words to me, but that is how scrabble dictionaries are.
Entry first conceived on 7 July 2023, 13:49 UTC, last modified on 7 July 2023, 14:10 UTC
Website Copyright © 2004-2024 Jeff Epler