new project

I’ve decided I’m going to find a word that ends with “-LESSNESS” while playing online Boggle.

There are 22 that have 11 letters in them:

‘agelessness’, ‘aimlessness’, ‘airlessness’, ‘artlessness’, ‘awelessness’, ‘endlessness’, ‘godlessness’, ‘gutlessness’, ‘haplessness’, ‘hatlessness’, ‘joblessness’, ‘joylessness’, ‘lawlessness’, ‘leglessness’, ‘raylessness’, ‘saplessness’, ‘sexlessness’, ‘sinlessness’, ‘sunlessness’, ‘toplessness’, ‘uselessness’, ‘witlessness’

There are another 61 at 12 letters, but I think those 22 are a good place to start.  Seems totally doable.

About a year ago, I made a few lines of program that simulates a boggle board to test how often a word should appear.  The simulation uses the letter distribution you’d get with the version of Master Boggle that I own (there were at least two (very slightly) different sets of dice that came with 5x5 Boggle).  By that count, “lessness” appears only once every 160 boards.

Then I beefed up the program, to check to see if any of the 22 show up on a given board.  According to my calculations (which might even be correct), I can expect to see an actual “lessness” word about once every 342 games.  Which isn’t exactly often.

But the thing is, I don’t have a lot of friends, and none of my friends want to play 342 games of boggle with me—because they will lose 342 times.  So I never actually get to use my physical board, and the online games use different letter distributions, and distributions I’m not entirely certain about.  My sense is that the “lessness” words will show up a little more often online, but still with some infrequency.  My guess would be that getting any 11-letter word occurs less than once each 100 boards, which makes the once every 342 seem actually pretty high.  Anyways, I’ll let you know when I find something.