[danvk]

I actually did try ILP, see https://stackoverflow.com/questions/79422270/why-is-my-z3-an...

I tried Z3 and OR Tools. I didn't try Gurobi. But this was enough to make me think ILP was a dead end. (There were a lot of dead ends in this project.)

I don't know much about integer programming, though, and I'd love to be proven wrong.

[LPisGood]

I saw that! In my experience, problems that seem completely intractable using open source tools often get solved in seconds using state of the art commercial approaches.

[danvk]

If you want to give it a try, I'd love to hear if that's the case! It's deleted in the repo now, but here's code to generate a spec for an ILP solver: https://github.com/danvk/hybrid-boggle/blob/62d3f01aed802734...

One interesting thing about Boggle is that the number of variables (16 cells) is very small compared to the number of coefficients on how they combine (the number of possible words).