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Roger Pielke Sr's avatar

This post makes one appreciate even more the value of mathematics in games. Excellent!

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maurizio .mau. codogno's avatar

being a long time lover of Waffle (on New Year's Eve I broke a streak of 250+ successful games) I'd like to add that in the theoretical case of the starting position with just a single green square it cannot be the top left or bottom right one, for obvious symmetry reasons.

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Richard Green's avatar

I had no idea it was so popular! Regarding your observation, I agree that if the solved game is not symmetric around the main diagonal, then the unique green square cannot be the top left, bottom right, or middle one. But what happens if the solved game is symmetric? The “MAMMA/AMASS” example in the post has a single green square in the top left and a lot of yellow squares. Is it possible to do something similar but with no yellow squares?

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maurizio .mau. codogno's avatar

yup, I forgot the letter at the centre of the Waffle board. As for symmetric games, I believe that a non-written rule is that all words are different. I may expect a departure from that rule on April Fools' Day, but not much else.

Having a single green square on a corner and no yellow squares means that we must have 12 unique letters and 9 letters repeated twice among the six words in the solution. It *could* be possible, but I believe a computer search would be needed.

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ConfusedWanderer's avatar

this was a pretty fun read

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Jan 22
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Richard Green's avatar

I agree that it’s challenging, but it’s still fun if the games are set up not to be too easy or too hard.

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