Related papers: Mathematics of the NYT daily word game Waffle
Wordle is a very popular word game that is owned by the New York Times. We can design parameterized strategies for solving Wordle, based on probabilistic, statistical, and information-theoretical information about the games. The strategies…
The New York Times (NYT) games have found widespread popularity in recent years and reportedly account for an increasing fraction of the newspaper's readership. In this paper, we bring the computational lens to the study of New York Times…
Wordle is a popular, online word game offered by the New York Times (nytimes.com). Currently there are some 2 million players of the English version worldwide. Players have 6 attempts to guess the daily word (target word) and after each…
A permutation is said to be a square if it can be obtained by shuffling two order-isomorphic patterns. The definition is intended to be the natural counterpart to the ordinary shuffle of words and languages. In this paper, we tackle the…
The crossword-like patterns of tiles in Scrabble form connected graphs of occupied sites on a square lattice. We find the most structureless description that reproduces means and covariances observed in real Scrabble games by adapting a…
A permutation is said to be a square if it can be obtained by shuffling two order-isomorphic patterns. The definition is intended to be the natural counterpart to the ordinary shuffle of words and languages. In this paper, we tackle the…
The Connections puzzle published each day by the New York Times tasks players with dividing a bank of sixteen words into four groups of four words that each relate to a common theme. Solving the puzzle requires both common linguistic…
A shuffle of two strings is formed by interleaving the characters into a new string, keeping the characters of each string in order. A string is a square if it is a shuffle of two identical strings. There is a known polynomial time dynamic…
Let $u \shuffle v$ denote the set of all shuffles of the words $u$ and $v$. It is shown that for each integer $n \geq 3$ there exists a square-free ternary word $u$ of length $n$ such that $u\shuffle u$ contains a square-free word. This…
For any odd integer $n\geq3$ a board (of size $n$) is a square array of $n\times n$ positions with a simple rule of how to move between positions. The goal of the game we introduce is to find a path from the upper left corner of a board to…
Scrambling the standard 3x3x3 Rubik's Cube corresponds to a random walk on a group containing approximately 43 quintillion elements. Viewing the random walk as a Markov chain, its mixing time determines the number of random moves required…
We investigate the mathematics behind unshuffles, a type of card shuffle closely related to classical perfect shuffles. To perform an unshuffle, deal all the cards alternately into two piles and then stack the one pile on top of the other.…
The New York Times Connections game has emerged as a popular and challenging pursuit for word puzzle enthusiasts. We collect 438 Connections games to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) against expert…
We study how many riffle shuffles are required to mix n cards if only certain features of the deck are of interest, e.g. suits disregarded or only the colors of interest. For these features, the number of shuffles drops from 3/2 log_2(n) to…
Combinatorial games lead to several interesting, clean problems in algorithms and complexity theory, many of which remain open. The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview of the area to encourage further research. In particular, we…
Solving crossword puzzles requires diverse reasoning capabilities, access to a vast amount of knowledge about language and the world, and the ability to satisfy the constraints imposed by the structure of the puzzle. In this work, we…
A circular word, or a necklace, is an equivalence class under conjugation of a word. A fundamental question concerning regularities in standard words is bounding the number of distinct squares in a word of length $n$. The famous conjecture…
This paper explores the entertainment experience and learning experience in Scrabble. It proposes a new measure from the educational point of view, which we call learning coefficient, based on the balance between the learner's skill and the…
A sliding puzzle is a combination puzzle where a player slide pieces along certain routes on a board to reach a certain end-configuration. In this paper, we propose a novel measurement of complexity of massive sliding puzzles with…
We develop infinitary analogues of the $N\times N\times N$ Rubik's cube. We'll be pushed to consider the possibility of transfinitely many twists and the foremost question we shall study is whether or not all infinite scrambles are…