Linguistics

    

The Countdown Letters Game

Authors: B. Moran

We present an analysis of the letters game from the TV show Countdown using Monte Carlo methods.This game requires finding the longest possible words in a set of randomly chosen letters. We show that the probability of finding a word of length k from N given letters follows a Fermi-Dirac Distribution with k as the variable and N acting as control parameter. Increasing N we get to a fixed point where a phase transition occurs before reaching the IR fixed point as N goes to infinity. Lastly, we find the expected total number of words per game, and the number of letters one must be given in order to have a significant probability to find all words in the dictionary.

Comments: 7 Pages. 12 Figures, LaTeX

Download: PDF

Submission history

[v1] 2023-10-29 10:14:42

Unique-IP document downloads: 466 times

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