Words with Repeated Letters in a Grid
Combinatorics
2025-12-01 v2
Abstract
Given a word , what is the maximum possible number of appearances of reading contiguously along any of the directions in in a large -dimensional grid (as in a word search)? Patchell and Spiro first posed a version of this question, which Alon and Kravitz completely answered for a large class of "well-behaved" words, including those with no repeated letters. We study the general case, which exhibits greater variety and is often more complicated (even for ). We also discuss some connections to other problems in combinatorics, including the storied -queens problem.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.19678,
title = {Words with Repeated Letters in a Grid},
author = {Zachary Halberstam and Carl Schildkraut},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.19678},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
42 pages, 12 figures