
Crosswords can be mathematically unique
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When you fill in a crossword, it can suddenly go from horribly difficult to extremely easy. This is similar to how some physical systems undergo phase transitions, but compared to them these puzzles can be mathematically unique.
Alexander Hartmann of Germany’s Oldenburg University was solving a crossword one day when he came up with a personal challenge. The idea was to find enough words to create a large island of connected letters. Then he realized that he had inadvertently run into a kind of well-known “percolation problem.”
(Tag Translation) Mathematics