JW Spelling Bee 2: Why Not Include "S"?
Why Not Include "S"? Why indeed did the NYT editors decide to omit "S" from Spelling Bee puzzles? Did they look at any data? Or did they just go by instinct? They might have considered a basic high-school math counting principle tells us that including S increases the possible combinations of 7 letters from 480,700 (25 choose 7) to 657,800 (26 choose 7) -- an increase of 37%. But how many of those combinations are valid puzzlecombos (i.e., 7 letter combinations that yield a pangram)? I used Mathematica to dig into the problem and determine the actual effects of including S in Spelling Bee. As it turns out, the number of puzzlecombos jumps from 4802 (with no S) to 9482, an increase of 97%. So adding S to the mix has an outsized effect on increasing the number of available puzzlecombos. This makes intuitive sense when you consider how many words contain S. Effect of S on the Spelling Bee puzzle universe I asked Mathematica to solve all 66,374 puzzles (i.e., 7 x 94