Linguistics

The Countdown Letters Game

Authors: B. Moran
Comments: 7 Pages. 12 Figures, LaTeX

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.
Category: Linguistics